By SJ Otto
There are a lot of communists, Marxist-Leninist and other far leftists who strongly oppose voting. They believe our time is better spent on building up a revolutionary movement that can overthrow our government. They see voting as just a waist of time. Some times such far left people do read this blog.
I hate Republicans and in retaliation I often vote for Democrats. That is not because I really like the Democrats. At times they are no better than Republicans. But I often vote for Democrats as the lesser of two evils. Many of these far leftists refuse to vote for any Democrats. They even hate Bernie Sanders and they consider Bernie and groups such as Democratic Socialists of America to be enemies of their far left parties. Politics can get strange. The Socialist Party USArejects voting for Democrats. They will only vote for socialist parties such as themselves. On the other hand the actual Communist Party USA, does cooperate with Democrats and they do vote for Democrats at times.
I think this year left us with plenty of reasons to vote and that is what I did. I voted.
In this year’s elections we had a man who was determined to stop poor people and many working poor people from getting health care. That was true of both our local Republican for Governor, Kris Kobach and our actual president Donald Trump. Trump wasn’t running, but many people voted for Democrats in US House races across the country, to put the brakes on our idiot president.
Trump is also out to destroy our environment. That is true of most Republicans, such as Ron Estes, our 4rth district US House Representative. He won re-election, even though his opponent James Thompson, worked extra hard and Estes shuffled through the election without doing to much work.
In my state of Kansas we had a man, Kobach, who was trying to destroy our public school system. He wanted to carry on what Governor Sam Brownback had done for nearly eight years.
The point of all of this is that the election was not about supporting bourgeois Democrats, it was about survival. Many of us had to live in this state and many more of us have to live in this country. Health care is a matter of life and death for a lot of people. We can’t afford to wait until an actual revolution to fix these serious problems. It could take many years to build a revolutionary movement. We can’t afford to wait all that time. We also can’t afford to let a stupid politician destroy our schools. Those eight years of a decimated school system stole education from a lot of young people and those are years that can’t be replaced.
Richard Ranzau and his fellow right-wingers sent back grant money needed for the WIC program, simply because they didn’t want poor immigrants to get the milk and other products the system provides. There are all kinds of poor people who needed that milk and the other products. Children went hungry due to the negligence of those county commissioners. Their motivations were prejudice and racism.
Voting had a concrete reality for many of us this fall. It was not just a luxury. People’s lives were dependent on politicians to do their jobs and carry on their responsibilities to their constituents. To allow destructive persons to use money and influence to win these seats and then destroy people’s lives was inexcusable. In my opinion it is irresponsible to let out-right criminals to rip us off. It is negligence to let bigots destroy people’s lives. We owe at least some attempts, even if we don’t succeed, to try and take part in these elections.