Last weekend, former Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello held his star-studded one-day Power To The People festival at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. The whole event was framed as a left-wing political gathering, and Morello joined Bruce Springsteen for a set of protest songs. Before the show, Morello did a Rolling Stone…

Some people out there seem to be confused, but I always vote in every local and every national election for every office and every ballot initiative since I was 18 years old. Some of my greatest civil rights heroes have fought and died so that we can all vote and I honor their memory in the ballot box every single time. 

To some of us, especially those of us like myself who have been scheduling secretaries for US senators, it often seems like a morally reprehensible choice between compromised corporate Democrats and fascist-minded Republicans. Where I live in California, I have the luxury of voting my conscience for president for third-party candidates that better align with my ideas of justice and equality. 

But in any and every contested race, as my mom Mary Morello always said, we have to fight the fascist every which way we can, recognizing that even if there’s but an inch of difference between two candidates, there are a lot of vulnerable people who could be greatly harmed in that inch. So vote your ass off, but don’t just exercise your right to vote. Exercise your right to fight for, organize for, struggle for, and manifest the kind of world you’d like to really see without compromise and without apologies before, during, and after election day. And let’s stop the fascists every which way we can. Power the people.

  • Ech@lemmy.ca
    71·
    5 hours ago

    There is no “folding” in life. There is no walking away. You can abstain from giving specific input, but you are still subject to and share responsibility for the results. What is needed is people that push to have the best possible choice for a given election and will vote for the best choice available. Doing only one is not enough.

    • 🇨🇦GreenBeard🇨🇦@lemmy.caEnglish
      27·
      5 hours ago

      There is a point at which the “best possible” is not sufficiently distinct from the worst possible that it becomes irrelevant for the individual in question. There was literally no benefit to Fetterman over Oz for most people. The only option was to work to make sure neither of them ever get another chance and to try to mitigate the harm that was going to be done when either one wins. I want to be clear, I don’t think this applies to the party as a whole but this is why (from the perspective of many) it does, because in their specific case the outcome is the same regardless. It’s a perfectly rational choice at the scale of the individual, because their interests, aren’t even on the ballot.

      • Ech@lemmy.ca
        71·
        4 hours ago

        You and anyone else that doesn’t think Oz would have been significantly worse, or thinks it “doesn’t affect them”, is naive or arguing in bad faith. The better option can suck, but both-sidesing the situation to excuse not voting at all serves nobody but the worse option.

        To pull from the quote from the OP:

        But in any and every contested race, as my mom Mary Morello always said, we have to fight the fascist every which way we can, recognizing that even if there’s but an inch of difference between two candidates, there are a lot of vulnerable people who could be greatly harmed in that inch. So vote your ass off…