this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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Why do you think voting is your only option?
Feel free to enumerate other options.
Organization (protests, unions, joining a local political movement), education (yourself or others), pressuring candidates (call your reps, protests), mutual aid & voter enfranchisement (food banks, clothing donations, volunteering at polling stations, any effort to protect the homeless). All of these are options, and this is just what I can think of off the top of my head. If you'd like, here's a page with a gallery of 346 nonviolent protest tactics.
Much of America has become trained to think only in terms of a vote – a vote in a system that was deliberately unequal from its founding through to today – to the exclusion of all other action. To say this is suffocating to any effort to enact change is an understatement; it is self-defeating in the extreme, serves only to perpetuate the status quo or worse, and yet time and time again I see so many people who have spent next to no time thinking outside these terms.