I wrote a post in 2016 about my intention to abstain from the election which brought Trump to power. Inadvertently it wound up being the last post here for a while. For the record, I am abstaining again in 2020. Here's my facebook post of today explaining why.
Solidarity with all the other non-voters and abstentionists resisting the corrupt self-perpetuating rituals of the white supremacist, capitalist political system that have been foisted upon us. It's a lie that 2020's sham elections are the only or even best path of change or progress. This mobilization of intimidation, corruption, shame and fear is terrorism against the people. This thoroughly antidemocratic charade filling us with dread and fear exists to protect the guardians of capital from any real challenge to their self-proclaimed right to administer society for their own benefit. Let us recall the words of Audre Lorde, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.” It is past time for that genuine change. The system proves to us every day all it has to offer is violent repression, indifference to human life, rigged laws, injustice, and the unceasing admonitions to fear any solutions not rubber stamped by its own bloody enforced order. The horror we are experiencing didn't start with Trump and it won't end with whichever murderous criminals win Tuesday's contest.
Personally I don't judge individuals who choose to participate in the electoral charade, though I think your merry-go-round ride in search of a brass ring is self-evidently futile, but I judge harshly political forces who set aside the obvious truths that lesser evilism and the lie of "harm reduction" can halt the system's slide to open fascism and organize people into pretending that participating in this charade is some act of resistance. While I wish fervently for Trump's fall, it is my solemn duty to warn that Biden's potential rise does not actually defeat Trumpism or the broader resurgence of white supremacist forces in this country. The racist police forces currently inflicting terror on the residents of American cities are by and large ordered and administered by the Democrats who have frantically been attempting to blunt the revolution in consciousness about racism that swept the country this year on the joyous flames of urban uprisings and rebellions.
The elections are important only because our enemies tell us they are. They're not. In truth the vast majority of common people have veto power over this nightmare, but the people in power want you to forget that. Direct action has always gotten the goods, and will again. It doesn't have to be this way. All power to the people!
