If you genuinely, truly, absolutely, cannot bring yourself to vote for the president of the united states, please just show up for elections anyway and vote for your congresspeople and local representatives.
Please.
Just.
If you cannot bring yourself to vote for the president because he's so disgusting of a candidate you morally cannot bring yourself to cross that line, then PLEASE vote for your congresspeople and local representatives who can block, defend, or present new bills, actions, acts, etc.
These are the people who can actually confirm or deny or impede horrendous acts when they happen.
Like. This is the bare minimum. If you cannot vote for the President, please just still vote for someone.
Change doesn't happen if you don't vote for the people willing to enact change.
The "smaller" elections often have the biggest impact on your actual life. Everything starts local and works its way outward, not the other way around. Every time a judge lets a cop off the hook for killing an unarmed person? You can vote those judges out. Those anti-queer laws in your home state? You can vote out the governor. Hate seeing your taxes raised for the sake of more cops while the schools and the roads go to shit? You can vote on those tax bills. "Blue" states aren't safer just because of who they vote for as president. It's because they voted for better governors, better judges, better laws.
You gotta do it, because fuckhead old conservatives are doing it. They've got bad ideas and they're willing to make them your problem. Your single vote might not count for much in the presidential election, but it absolutely has an impact on who is in charge in your particular town.
Your vote in a schoolboard election can mean the difference between electing someone who thinks public schools are good versus someone who reps Moms For Liberty and not so secretly wants to burn books that make them feel icky.
Part of why the regressive bigots of the right wing have had their way is because they work at the local level, and have traditionally seen minimal actual pushback because so much attention is placed on the highest offices. There's actually so few of them, they literally ship the same handful of people across state lines for their shitty little bigot cry-fests, and more and more we're seeing that they shrivel and run away at any show of opposing numbers in local school boards and parents' meetings.
There's more of us than there are of them. Time to remind them of that on a fundamental level.
