Where I’m at, personally, is that I think voting when you have the franchise is a civic responsibility.
If you’re from the USA and currently possess a vote, you do in fact have a duty to use it in the way that will do the most good to the most people. The weight of imperialism does not lift that burden, it multiplies it. You are determining how much funding UN famine relief may get and whether distant countries will be invaded and you cannot shrink from that. No amount of whinging about your red state (states flip all the time—Virginia was ruby red a few decades ago!) or your misplaced guilt can change that. Everyone from the dawn of time has lived with hands soaked in blood, being part of a society means being complicit in horror, you can become paralyzed by that or you can start to work to save people.
(If a single person is protected by a Harris presidency who’d die under Trump then you actually do have a moral obligation to help them. Failing in that task is, in my opinion, selfishness. Sometimes sympathetic selfishness: people who have lost family due to the incompetence of the best option have the right to shrink back from necessary choices. Humans grieve. That just means everyone further out in the circles of tragedy needs to develop some risk assessment skills and vote on their behalf.)
If you’re in Britain or Brasil or the EU or Georgia or Aotearoa the same holds true. The global community remains a community in which every country impacts the other, no nation lacks some dispossessed minority which needs to be protected. Voting is always important and you never get to slack off. Even if your vote is diluted or subverted you have to try. There is no winning the task of creating a better world, you’re going to keep doing it for the rest of your life.
I believe all this is true and I also believe that Tumblr is the worst possible environment to convince anyone of their truth. It’s probably not possible to harangue anyone into taking moral action. The disappointment of a stranger rarely motivates anyone! But one does have to speak up periodically, so here’s my general plea: Vote. It’s quite literally the bare minimum.
