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For all the good it will do. I try not to be too sour about this and remember that we Americans are privileged to be able to cast our votes and have our voices heard, etc., etc. But I have to say, it’s sometimes difficult to gin up any real enthusiasm for voting when you live in a place that’s so overwhelmingly tilted toward one side of the partisan spectrum… and your philosophy aligns with the other side. Hell, the Democrats didn’t even run a candidate for state-level representative in my district this year. I had a choice between a far-right Republican and a somewhat-less-far-right Republican who’s running as an Independent. And on the federal level, the only Democrat who ever manages to win in Utah — and he’s not even my<\/i> representative, naturally — is so much of a Blue Dog that he’d probably be called a Republican any other place in the country, and yet he still<\/i> has to fight tooth-and-nail every election against those who cry that he’s too liberal.<\/p>\n
I understand why people don’t participate in the process, I really do. When it feels like your vote and your voice don’t matter, that things are going to go a certain way regardless of what you think or feel or do, and moreover they’re always<\/i> going to go that way, well, what’s the point? You may as well be farting into a strong wind for all the impact you have on the inevitable outcome. And yet I go and do it every two years anyhow. It might be because my parents and Schoolhouse Rock<\/i> instilled me with a sense of civic responsibility, even in the face of utter futility. But I suspect it’s something more childish, a simple act of defiance intended to show somebody, somewhere, that not everybody in this state is marching in lock-step, that there is<\/i> a different opinion out there. Not that my decidedly left-of-center opinion counts one bit in Utah, of course. And so goes another election year…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For all the good it will do. I try not to be too sour about this and remember that we Americans are privileged to be able to cast our votes and have our voices heard, etc., etc. But I have to say, it’s sometimes difficult to gin up any real enthusiasm for voting when you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}