“If voting really accomplished anything, they’d make it illegal,” your radical friends say? Well they are making it illegal, so tell them to shut the fuck up.
And if they, or you, are sitting on a mountain of privilege because you’re white, male, cis, or unlikely to have friends and family affected by ICE or poverty or poor health or old age, this goes double for you! Sure, the Democrats offer far less than is needed, and far less than revolution. But while we all sit around waiting for the great socialist utopia, should people have to suffer deportation? Should they have to suffer losing their jobs, their apartments, their water, their clean air and soil, their health, their children, or their lives, just because you’re too gosh darn pure to press a little circle of ink onto a piece of paper next to a lesser of two evils?
My buddy Derrick Lemos from Ground Game LA said it best in a recent Facebook post, so I’m just going to let his words speak for themselves:
Dear Socialist Whites who are shitting on voting: Unless you’re gonna be John Brown, we don’t wanna hear it. We know how shitty things are under Dems. You don’t need to tell us. They come after our votes, then leave us out to dry, but if the last two years has shown us anything It’s that it’s easier and safer to mobilize without the threat of the Feds protecting fascists and the White House encouraging white terrorism.
The only feasible option right now is to hijack the democratic party and people like AOC, Stacey Abrams, Beto are doing just that.
We know people still get incarcerated, droned, exploited with Dems in charge. You know how we know? BECAUSE WE’RE THE ONES IT HAPPENS TO. They chase our votes and don’t deliver on promises. Believe me, if anyone is exhausted it’s us. AOC, Gillum, Stacey Abrams and countless others are running on fulfilling the promise establishment Dems have made time after time and failed to live up to.
The mechanisms are not in place for anything else. If you think jacobin is going to convince marginalized people to put their lives on the line for revolution when you aren’t even doing that, you’re delusional.
This doesn’t mean we can’t get it there, but you need to do your part. We sure as hell are.
It’s other white people who get complacent. How many “If Hillary had won, we’d be at brunch right now” signs did you see? How many “this is my first time protesting” signs did you see? How many white women showed up because their rights are in jeopardy but were MIA when our kids are killed, when our people are deported? When we’re the targets of anti lgbt violence?
The problem is not with us. It’s you. It’s all the other white people you’ve failed to talk to, to recruit, to encourage more from. You keep insisting that we’re the cause of our pain by voting Dem. You keep screaming at us but won’t even confront your relatives who voted for Trump. This is not a failure of poc or lgbtq folks. We put in work for us because no one else looks out for us.
Remember in Les Miserables when the young, educated white dudes want revolution and are like “THE PEOPLE WILL COME TO OUR SIDE” and then no one comes and they all die bc they didn’t plan or tell people they were revolting?
That’s you.
So if you’re not doing your part to train and supply revolutionaries, or at the very least support our campaigns to enact real policies that would protect us, please shut the fuck up.
“The problem is not with us. It’s you” – precisely what the voting cycle is there to do : divide