I'm going to have to agree that voting is a great
waste of time (at least in
this Country).
It's not that I believe that
voting is useless, or that
my vote doesn't make a difference. I fully believe in the
power of voting to
choose a candidate. However, I believe that you are voting for people, not for issues and that most candidates are so alike that it's
irrelevant.
When you vote for somebody, you're saying, I think you would make a good ____ and that your stance on the issues is what I want. One would think that the fact that these people are called "
representatives", that instead of representing their own views (and
pocketbook,
employment, and
big business) that they would represent the views of their constituents. You don't see that though...nobody ever talks about how they voted for choice A on issue X because that's what they thought their constituents would want, it's all about how
they voted this way because it would represent
them well or not well. You can't vote for a person and expect them to represent you and what you want. Not only do their
views change, but they may not even vote the same way that they said they would one they're there. This very much diminishes the actual representation that you receive by choosing a particular
candidate.
I also have this belief that (at least in the "two"-party system, where in the very least we only have two candidates with a chance for winning...at least in the near future. Not that if it came down to my choice I'd pick either of them...) if you didn't know who won the election, and none of the newspapers mentioned any personal information about the candidates, that if all you had was the policies that they implemented, voted for, or made decisions about, chances are you would not be able to determine who had actually been elected. This is just my
pet theory, and might not
hold any water, so feel free to disagree.
*grin*
But despite all my
nitpicking with the representative process as a whole, it's more that idealistically I believe that significant change starts in the
individual, and especially in the environment that you create around yourself.
So shoot me, I'm a hopelessly naive idealist. If I believe in
freedom, and
freedom of religion, I am going to bring my children up with the
freedom to choose their religion. If I believe in
toleration and
the basic worth of humanity, then I will demonstrate that in the way I treat the people around me. Although it sounds awfully silly, I believe this is actually a really
effective way of affecting
change in your life and in the
world around you.
In short, I really believe that
you can't force change,
you can't legislate change,
you can't change other people.
People can only change themselves.