Voting is Pointless because I have a strong-interest in Democracy

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Idaho chooses not to vote because he already feels disenfranchised -- rendering the act of voting itself rather moot.

He is taxed by a government that does not spend all of those dollars on meaningful public works, but allows an inordinate portion of those taxes to fund programs that benefit a specific industry or segment of the polity without adding much to the greater good (or adding but only in the most indirect of fashions).

He is constrained by laws that criminalize personal vices which do no significant harm to any person simply because that criminalization conforms to the moral consensus prevalent half a century in the past. His personal freedom has be unfairly diminished without adding to the greater good.

The current choices for governance appear to be limited to parties who are either ineffectual, self-defeatingly reactionary, or (for the mainstream) whose primary concern is the maintenance of their own political power -- even at the expense or curtailment of the moral and intellectual goals that form the "spiritual" focus of that party's founding -- that they have discarded, effectively, their own raisons d'etre.

In short, he views the current UK politiculture as being divorced from relevance and either unconcerned with, and sometimes actively detrimental to, the greater good of the polity. The trappings, traditions, and procedures enacted by those in power (whether enacted by design or through the unthinking assumption that this modus vivendi was as it should be) serve only to reify the current state of affairs. He has been rendered politically mute -- disenfranchised.

Since he is unwilling to simply decerebrate himself with Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood (supply local equivalent as needed), he finds himself trapped betwixt and between. He is not uncaring or dulled enough to cease caring nor is he willing to blithely support the current state of affairs. The answer is a small personal "vote" for civil disobedience -- an announced active choice to not participate.



I do not think that maintaining such a stance is psychologically healthy. In the long run Idaho will have to:

1) conform, support whichever party has enough of a vestige of "greater good" attached to it in his eyes to make it the least unpalatable.

2) become a candidate himself, publicly voicing his assessment of the state of affairs as is and establishing his candidacy on a return to true support of the greater good as he defines it (can work, but most such efforts become quixotic)

3) numb himself with media, religion, poetry, drink or what have you (this was Baudelaire's answer: "One should always be drunk...")

4) opt out of the current environment entirely and move to a English-speaking quasi-frontier where politics is as close to functionally irrelevant as possible (small town Alaska, the Montana hills, Canadian NW, or.... [cannot resist, too delicious]...northern Idaho)