From: dolan@noarlw.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Voting to make a difference
Date: 12 Aug 92 17:21:30 GMT

Roger David Carasso claims that _his_ voting doesn't make a difference,
although everyone else's apparently does. Wrong!

Can't place the reference, either Scientific American's Mathematical
Recreations column, or Douglass Hofstadter's _The Mind's I_, are the
best bets, but the whole point of the exercise is that each of us must
consider ourselves as a statistical sample of one, the only sample
available. If _I_ cannot be convinced that voting is important, then,
all else being equal, I must assume myself to represent the majority of
people dealing with as much information on the subject as I have
available and coming from that information to similar conclusions.

In Roger's case, that means that the "arrogant dipwad bigots with a hate
thing for minority groups and an obsessive lust for big hooters" vote
will be vastly under-represented in the final vote tally. Not, perhaps,
the worst possible outcome, but that's beside the point.

Thus Roger, by being a sample of one, that chooses not to vote, chooses
also, from his point of view, for the majority of those that believe
as he does.

And so for each of us, if we choose not to vote, we must assume that by
so doing we have chosen for, not just like, that block of voters who
share our experience, education, and viewpoints, and we should
therefore expect, and take as the result of our actions, that those who
believe opposite will prevail.

Only if _I_ can be convinced to vote can I reasonably assume that those
who hold my viewpoint will be culpable of similar conviction.

All this was brought on by two things. First, I am rapidly entering the
generation (as a pre-baby-boomer) who vote in such overwhelming
proportions that they essentially control politics in this country,
giving us the great wash of conservatives-who-can't-conserve that we've
been electing.

Second, I heard Bob Dylan on the radio this morning singing in the '60s
"your sons and your daughters are beyond your command", and I realized
that Bob was right then, but wrong today; my parents' generation had
won that fight by attrition. The really radical all died of drugs and
other indulgances, and the rest of us have been co-opted into the power
structure by being granted the wealth to invest that comes simply with
increasing age, and only the economy our parents passed on in which to
invest it.

So, until the generation of the RDCs catches on that they choose for
their _generation_ when they choose not to vote, we will continue to
put forward for election, and to elect, the representatives of "things
as they are at any price".

Kent - the last four dozen year old flaming liberal.

--
Kent, the man much too far from xanth.
Kent Paul Dolan, C.S.C. contractor to Fleet Numerical Oceanography Center,
Monterey, California.  Making the world safe for tropical cyclones.

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