I think I've figured "I'm Not Voting This Year" out. in Those Public Entries

For anyone who’s sick to death of my “politickal anal-eesis” (my sibling in Christ, I’m right there with you), here’s a real throwback:

(I always related to Phoebe. …Yeah, the girl with ADHD relates to the girl with ADHD. I’m sure none of you are surprised.)

But for those of you who, by some miracle, aren’t sick of my politics yet, here’s something I thought of today.

See, I, like many people, am a much better person when I grocery shop than when I cook. I mean, I do like healthy foods (my favorite vegetable is broccoli), but right now, I’m working full-time, taking care of seven cats (Smudge, Nyx, and Nyx’s five kittens), and trying to keep up with a three-bedroom house, all on my own. …Pretty glad I decided to put off applying to grad school right now. Anyway. So I end up buying lots of fresh veggies and fruit, going through my mental recipe book and the dozen actual cookbooks I own, planning grand plans for my haul.

Only to put them in the fridge, forget about them, and then either end up tossing moldy/slimy/expired produce¹, or just throwing the salvageable odds and ends into a pot of soup. Which is exactly what happened today, with two delicata squash, an apple, a red onion, a jalapeño, and two parsnips. I mean, this is going to make a good soup, I’m sure, but… Well… My mouth wrote a check my ass couldn’t cash. Again. I should stick to frozen veggies; I actually use them.

So as I was cleaning, peeling, chopping, slicing, and dicing my various soup-bound ingredients, my mind started wandering. As it does. And it landed, as it so often has lately, on people who aren’t voting this year.

Now, if it were just a bunch of middle-class, cisgender, straight (or in denial) white guys, I could just write them off. My ex, Mark, is a dedicated non-voter, and totally apolitical to boot. I always respected that about him, honestly: He genuinely doesn’t care about politics, doesn’t care who’s in charge, and doesn’t give it a second thought. If you’re not going to vote, then be actually, genuinely apolitical. And I can understand that particular category of people who won’t/don’t vote: The system works for them, so why should they do anything that threatens to change it?

But no; every “I’m Not Voting This Year” person I’ve encountered is any/all of the following: A cis woman. A trans person. Neurodivergent. Queer. Nonwhite. Working-class, lower-class, unemployed, unable to be employed. Disabled. In other words, the very people who should care who’s in charge. The very people who should be doing everything they can to make their voices heard. The very people who should care who’s appointing federal judges, and especially Supreme Court judges.² The very people who should care if DEI initiatives are on the chopping block, or if Medicare/Medicaid/SNAP/TANF are going to be gutted. Because these policies affect us most of all.

And the reason? Always, always, always, “Palestine.” Not because they actually want the genocide to end, but because… Well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s not like the GOP are making any secret of what they’ll do if they’re voted in. I have said it before, and I’ll keep saying it, Project 2025 is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, laid out in plain English, for all to see. The ACLU has done a primer on it. Literally every non-Fox and non-Rupert Murdoch owned paper has done an exposé on Project 2025. The fact of the matter is, if the GOP wins the White House and Congress in November, every single person on the planet is fucked. Completely. In every hole and a few that the GOP will create just so they can fuck it.

Every single “I’m Not Voting This Year” person knows what Project 2025 is. Every single one of them knows what’s on the line. But they still refuse to vote. Because “Paaaaaaaaaaaaaalestiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine-uh!” Don’t the rest of us Zionists understand that “this is a GENOCIDE-uh?!” And if we don’t understand that, then shouldn’t we understand that the Democrats are intentionally alienating a major pool of potential voters-uh?

…Okay, um… Kids? If your whole political persona is endlessly demanding that the candidates do exactly as you say, then throwing tantrums when they don’t, claiming that you “knew all along” they wouldn’t (confirmation bias is not proof of ill intent!), and “that’s why I’m not voting”, then no, the Dems aren’t “losing a major pool of potential voters”. They are strategically avoiding a group of people who (a) weren’t going to vote for them anyway and (b) are a PR disaster. You can’t sell your wares to people who look for reasons not to buy them. Because no, I’m sorry to tell you, screaming, stamping your feet, and threats aren’t the actions of intelligent, emotionally mature adults who genuinely want the world to be the best it can be. They are the actions of a spoiled toddler who was told they can’t have ice cream for breakfast. No one wants to be associated with a perfectly preventable train wreck, except the people who want the train to crash.

And that’s when I paused, knife in hand, mid-chop on the squash. Of course! It’s so simple! How could I have taken this long to realize it?!

The people who aren’t voting this year “because PAAAAAALESTIIIIIIINE-uh!” are suicidal! The “I’m not voting until COPmala promises to end the genocide-uh!” crowd are expressing suicidal ideation.

See, as Natalie Wynn pointed out in her still-relevant video on voting in 2020, there are two types of suicidal ideation. There is passive suicidal ideation, where you just have the thought that you don’t want to be alive, or that everyone would be better off if you were dead, but you’re not actually going to kill yourself. And then there’s active suicidal ideation, where you want to die, you have a plan, and you’re going to do it.

And contained within active suicidal ideation is what I call “mass shooter suicidal ideation.” See, mass shootings are almost never acts of mass murder, for the sake of killing as many people as you can in one go. They are almost always murder-suicides. Think of just how many mass shooters kill themselves, or are killed by law enforcement (or, as I suspect is more often the case, commit suicide by cop by refusing to surrender or put down their weapon). That’s not an accident, and it’s not a coincidence. Pretty much every mass shooter in history has left some kind of record of their mental state immediately before they pulled it off, and in almost every case, they’ve expressed some suicidal intent.

This isn’t me pulling anything out of my ass, by the way. The idea that mass shootings are really incredibly violent and destructive acts of suicide has been around for several years. And yes, I do realize how close that skates to the idea that “mentally ill people are violent and dangerous,” and I want to be clear that I do not agree with that statement, nor would I ever promote it. Not as a blanket statement, in any case. The vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent and will not commit acts of violence, especially mass shootings.

However.

It’s no kinder or more scientifically/psychologically sound to pretend that zero mentally ill people are violent, or can/will commit acts of violence against other people. Every single mass shooter in the US has shown symptoms of depression, at the very least, and symptoms of psychotic disorders at worst. In a legal sense, each and every mass shooting is an insane act committed by an insane person.

To be clear, I am not making a “mental illness = violence” argument. I am arguing that “mentally unwell people who live in a society where mental illness is misunderstood at best and fearfully scorned at worst, where health care is considered a privilege and mental healthcare even more so, where law enforcement officers are almost universally untrained in de-escalation tactics, and where certain diagnoses of neurodivergence can make you ineligible for employment or medical care, are going to resort to desperate acts when their symptoms become unbearable.” Literally, we are selling the cure to a sickness that we’re creating: When sick people can’t get the treatment they need, they’re going to get worse and worse and worse, until they pass the event horizon.

And to be even more clear, the risk of suicide as it relates to mental illness is not, on the whole, “every depressed person is, at some point, going to kill themselves and take others with them.” Suicidality in mentally ill people is almost always turned inward. But on the occasions where it turns outward, we need to pay attention. Especially when it comes to men and boys; mass shooters are, almost always, young white cishet men. So there is an argument to be made (that I agree with) that mass shootings are not only acts of suicide, but they are an attempt for the shooter to reaffirm their masculinity. Because society thinks of mass shootings as acts of terrorism -and, by that way, acts of war- they become masculinized in the minds of young men. If (through this line of thinking) the manliest and most valiant thing a man can do is go off to war and kill people, then it should stand to reason that the manliest thing any boy can do in peacetime is to commit an act of terrorism. It’s kind of a form of stolen valor, when you get right down to it.

“Okay, so mass shootings are acts of suicide that boys and men do to reaffirm their masculinity,” I hear you say. “What’s your point? And how are you making the connection between mass shootings and the ‘I’m Not Voting This Year’ people?”

Well, if direct violence, i.e. mass shootings, are masculine in the eyes of society, then wouldn’t indirect violence, i.e. sitting out an incredibly consequential presidential election when you know what’s at stake, be considered feminine? And wouldn’t people who want to distance themselves from masculinity partake in acts that affirm/reaffirm their femininity? So not voting is kind of a riff on Lysistrata, which is an ancient Greek comedy in which all the women of Greece withhold sex from men until they agree to stop going to war with each other. If they don’t vote “because PAAAAAAAALESTIIIIIIIIINE!”, they can say they’re taking a principled stance against genocide.

…Or they think they’re doing a Lysistrata. They’re not. See, shit like this is why we need to stop cutting the humanities from schools; if more people had actually read Lysistrata, they would understand that the goal of the women in the play wasn’t “getting my own way,” or “I’ll hold my breath until you do what I want you to.”

Look, I don’t think that any “Not Voting This Year” person is ignorant of Project 2025. They all know what the Orange Shitgibbon’s response to this second Nakba is. They all know how bad this could get. I don’t even think, by and large, that “they don’t care.” I think they’re just tired of constantly feeling punished by an increasingly and disturbingly conservative society, and they want everyone else to feel as punished by society as they do. There’s an element of turnabout, here: “You did this to me, and now I’m doing this to you.” And a bit of disavowal: “I didn’t vote, so you can’t blame me for how things turned out.”

Well, here’s the thing: Turnabout is always fair game.

This is not turnabout.

This is “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

If you know about Project 2025 and you still aren’t, at the bare-ass fucking minimum, voting against it, then you still allowed it to happen. This is one of those rare cases where the maxim “Intent doesn’t matter, only outcome,” is wholly and entirely applicable, to each and every registered voter in the US and the non-disenfranchised territories. (By the way: We need to pass a law letting residents of Washington, DC vote in presidential elections. I think that would at least help steer our wayward system in the right direction.) And saying “I’m not voting because PAAAAAALESTIIIIIINE-uh!” is not, in reality, a principled stance against genocide. It’s throwing Palestinians under the bus, because you can’t face your own lack of moral fiber, and you don’t care to listen to anyone who tells you that’s exactly what it is. Everyone’s the bad guy, except for you.

But, as someone who was too narcissistic to understand it once told me: “When you point the finger at someone else, there are still three fingers pointing back to you.”

I can’t tell anyone what to do. Or, I should say, I can tell you what I think you should do, and what I’d like you to do. But I’m not stupid, I know I don’t have control over anyone else. I can’t make you do anything. I can’t make you realize what your actions, or lack thereof, are actually doing. You know what the stakes are. You know what the assignment is. The rest is up to you. Just don’t think for a second that, if the worse comes to the worst and Project 2025 becomes our reality, that I’m going to offer you anything even remotely resembling grace or forgiveness. I will not. You don’t deserve it. I’m sorry you’ve suffered so much in your life; truly, I am. I’ve suffered in my life, too. I’m neurodivergent. I’ve dealt with suicidal thoughts for most of my life. But your suffering is not a justification, a reason, or an excuse to cause suffering to other people. And if you think it is, I have no pity and no love for you, because at the end of the day, “I’m in pain and everyone else must suffer with me!” is the single most Trumpian, most Netanyahu-esque, most GOP mentality anyone can have.

¹American grocery stores: STOP 👏 PACKAGING 👏 FRESH 👏 MUSHROOMS 👏 IN 👏 PLASTIC 👏👏👏. That’s how they get slimy! Pack them in paper bags. Or at least let customers buy them in bulk.

²To the people here who are “undecided” or “Not Voting This Year”, let me ask you a question that I genuinely want to hear your answer to: Do you think the SCROTUM would have ruled in favor of broadly-defined and wide-reaching presidential immunity if they did not genuinely believe that Trump will win in November? I’m not kidding; I want to know your answer to that question.