Finally, for just a little while, this country’s citizens can turn on the TV and enjoy their favorite show in peace and quiet without having to suffer a barrage of political ads which, rather than coming up with ideas for the problems at hand and soon to come, advertise their sponsoring candidates’ virtues while giving their rivals a bad name.
U.S. politicians have spent millions and millions of dollars on this last midterm election. To give a general idea, in the campaign for one federal Congressional position about $15 million was spent between just two Cuban descendants in South Florida. I should mention that a U.S. Congressman serves for two years; once finished they can be reelected indefinitely, which means that soon they will begin anew with the same old spiel, spending just as much money as before.
And it goes without saying that the candidates for state governor also spent tens of millions of dollars in political ads between the two of them. Not a single day went by in the last six months when mailboxes were not overflowing with electoral propaganda. After such a huge wave of advertising to get votes, you’d think that election precincts would be swarming with potential voters and that ballot boxes would be totally full — but something quite the contrary happened.
In the case of Florida, only slightly more than 30 percent of registered voters went to cast their ballot. Citizens barely seemed to care that elections were going on. The vast majority did not even bother to ask for an absentee ballot, and many of those who did ended up tossing it in the recycle bin where they live. Abstaining to vote won by a landslide. Needless to say, nature wasn’t to blame — Election Day was nice and sunny with perfect temperatures, yet even that wasn’t enough to kindle the slightest desire to show up to electoral precincts.
The news that this country’s citizens have no interest in voting in midterm elections doesn’t surprise anyone. When you ask any citizen who didn’t vote why, the answer is always more or less the same: They don’t believe that they can really change anything by voting.
Citizens are increasingly disappointed by politicians, who promise one thing before being elected and end up doing just the opposite when they succeed. It’s a vicious cycle: Politicians don’t care what their voters think, and voters don’t care what politicians do. Voters seem to think that all candidates are made the same, and because of that most choose not to vote.
As someone once told me, there are two ways to view the problem of abstaining from voting in elections, which is always the democratic winner: The optimist’s view, which is that people don’t go vote because they feel fine with the system and see no need to vote because, whatever happens, the system still stays the same; and the pessimist’s view, which is that people don’t vote because anyone who is elected ultimately won’t change anything, and consequently the underlying issues remain unresolved. Personally, I think they’re both right — politicians are all basically the same.
There are two parties, two wings of the eagle, and it doesn’t matter who’s in charge in Congress or the presidency because nothing ever changes. Democrats and Republicans are the same thing; the only real difference between them is in their form, not their substance.
Now Republicans have a majority in both houses of Congress and nothing different is going to happen from before they had the majority. When Obama was elected in 2008, both houses were in the hands of the Democrats. What happened then? Nothing.
I figure that someday we’ll find a way to encourage U.S. citizens to flood the polls and elect their candidate of choice, but until that happens, only a minority of voters will vote on Election Day.
The author is a Cuban journalist based in Miami.
I would think that a Cuban journalist would not hesitate to speak the language of CLASS STRUGGLE in his analysis of elections in America. Even liberal Ralph Nader has said for years that corporate America controls both the Democratic and Republican parties. The labor unions here are subservient to the Democrat Party-which now and then manages to throw a dry bone to Big Labor. For decades both parties were loyal to the Cold War ideology of brainless anti-communism. I remember the hysteria over Soviet missiles in Cuba during the 1962 crisis. But it was OK to support a force of counter-revolutionary rebels to invade Cuba? OK to place U.S. missiles on bordering Turkey ? It was OK to attempt to assassinate Cuba’s popular leader Fidel Castro? And long after the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War it is still OK -with bipartisan support-to embargo poor heroic Cuba? The fact is the American mind is still poisoned by lying FREE ENTERPRISE propaganda.
The working class voter has no choice but to adjust to this insane social system. But history teaches that ruling classes can oppress the people for only so long. Do you think the collapse of the Soviet Union was the end of history ? That Robber Baron capitalism can mock its democratic Socialist critics for another century ? That a great friend of humanity like Ernesto Che Guevara lived and died in vain ? Is not the TRUTH still revolutionary ? And the human spirit still burns with hatred for injustice ? I can hear the fighting words of the popular musical ” Les Miserables ” …
” Do you hear the people sing ? ”
Let our ONE PERCENT plutocracy tremble !