I’ve only voted in the presidential elections once. Ever since then, I’ve developed this “don’t vote, don’t complain” mentality. I don’t vote for presidents because I don’t feel I know enough or care to know enough to make an educated decision. And that’s my right as an American. Some people have gotten all angry about me not voting, but hey it’s the land of the free and I’m CHOOSING to not vote, not being lazy or taking that opportunity for granted.
This election season is… a nightmare. It’s chaos. I don’t know if it’s always like this but I tend to turn a blind eye because I’ve chosen not to engage, but man. I get why people joke about losing friends over things they post on Facebook during election season.
This year I’ve registered to vote again. and I’m going to vote. and my heart is breaking over what I see on Facebook. Not just because people are turning into grade A jerks, but also because they’re doing it for no real reason, as far as I can see.
As someone who has never participated in elections and finally decided to vote, I wanted to share with you the two biggest factors in that decision.
ONE // CONVERSATIONS
One of my best friends from high school grew into one of the most opinionated people I’ve ever met in my entire life. and over the course of the year, we’ve had a few conversations about this election. She’s mixed – her dad is black and her mom is white – and one day she told me that if a group of people are targeted based on their skin color, even if it’s not hers…. she worries. and as I thought about that, and thought about how my own (step)family are immigrants with dark skin and heavy (filipino) accents, I started to understand.
Here’s the thing about race. I’m  not going to dive into this as deep as I would if this were an entire blog post dedicated to race issues or if we were in person. You can’t tell a person what they can and can’t be worried about. One of my friends is this big huge black dude. Like… he’s massive. He can bench press two baby elephants at once. He’s terrified of being pulled over, based on his previous experience and what’s going on in the news. I can’t tell him he can’t be terrified, because I am not a big huge black dude. Side note: he also wears girl deodorant and loves smelly candles and buys frappuccinos. I’d be more likely to cause trouble than he would. But when I get pulled over, I get immediately concerned for my insurance, not my life.
You just can’t do it.
In that conversation, she wasn’t trying to persuade me. At that point she knew my “don’t vote, don’t complain” stance and had never made me feel inferior for it.
TWO // MY OWNÂ CURIOSITY
Then once day I watched a video online. Nobody sent it to me or forced me to read it, I just happened to stumble upon it and decided to watch it. It was a comedian who was joking about the presidential election but at the end pointed out something about one of the candidates that I could and would never be able to unhear or unsee. It clicked – between that conversation with Savannah months before and that video – that this was one election where I would actually be upset if one candidate won, and I realized that in order to have any say about that, I’d have to vote.
You know what didn’t make me decide to vote?
Mean Facebook posts.
Mean Facebook comments.
People telling me to and how I should.
The two arenas in which this decision happened were private and personal.
That means that all of the mean, harsh words going around Facebook have done nothing to impact me regarding the election… but it definitely made me start avoiding people in real life. I can’t un-see that kind of meanness.
Anyway.
I don’t love political discussions, so I will end this post with the most true meme that you will ever encounter.
Okay but for real: have you ever found any benefit in social media discussions about politics? Have you ever had your mind changed because of a Facebook conversation/post/etc?
