From: zursch@whizkid.wpd.sgi.com (Captain Coffee)
Newsgroups: ba.politics
Subject: Not Voting
Date: 9 Sep 92 18:10:45 GMT
Distribution: ba
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA

I culled this from the net. It's not directed at anyone in 
particular here, but I thought it relevant...


MIKE ROYKO
	
	I've never been bothered that droves of people don't vote. Not once
have I ever written a column before an election urging people to
exercise that right.
	But what does bother me is when I'm forced to listen to some bore
explain to me why he doesn't vote. Many non-voters find something
profound and important in what they don't do.
	It happened again a couple of days ago. This time it was a man about
30 years old. Unmarried. Big-paying job. High-rise apartment. Cushy
lifestyle. Self-ordained ladies' man.
	``I'm not going to vote,'' he said, without being asked. ``And I'll
tell you why. It doesn't matter to me who wins because it doesn't affect
my life. It has nothing to do with the way I live. It won't change my
life in one way or another.
	``It may be important to people in the news business because they
make their living writing about elections. And it is important to people
in politics because it has to do with their egos. But to most of us, it
is irrelevant. Regardless of who is in office, nothing changes. At least
nothing that affects me personally.''
	Well, I made a mistake. I tried to answer him.
	I began to talk about the Vietnam War, and how we might have avoided
or shortened that bloodbath had we given more thought to the kind of
people we sent to Washington. Had there been more brains and less
bluster in Congress, we might have been out of there sooner. Who knows
how many lives would have been saved?
	But then I remembered that, despite his age, he had managed to avoid
being touched by the war. He came from that fortunate upper-middle-class
background whose members were so adept at finding loopholes in the draft
laws, the generation that left its social conscience behind with the
abolition of the draft. Thus he, like so many of his peers, had spent
those bloody war years increasing his knowledge of rock music and
savoring the pleasures provided by the birth control pill.
	So, from his safe perspective, it wouldn't make much difference who
held office then, since the war didn't touch him, as he said,
``personally.''
	Then I began a small lecture about the '50s and the '60s, and how it
mattered a great deal to the black people of this country which
candidates happened to be elected to public office during those times.
Not only to Congress and the White House, but to the state legislatures,
and even various sheriff's offices.
	All of that monumental civil-rights legislation, a century overdue,
wouldn't have come about if there hadn't been enough people in public
office who believed in it. And there were times when it was a close
call. One or two more boobs could have swung important votes back a few
decades. Luckily, the right kind of votes were there. And this resulted
in dramatic changes in the lives of millions of people.
	But then I remembered that he wasn't black. He grew up in a wealthy
family in a wealthy suburb, and his closest contact to blacks was when
the hired help came to clean the house. And the closest he ever got to a
place like Selma or to people like Bull Connor was when they might have
caught his eye on the color TV set that undoubtedly stood next to his
teen-listing telephone in his air-conditioned bedroom.
	So he was right. Those who held office in those years weren't
significant to his lifestyle.
	I didn't even bother to talk to him about things such as worker-
safety laws that have been passed over the years, laws that make it less
likely that a workman might have his hand chopped off by a factory
machine, although we still have a long way to go in that direction.
That, too, doesn't affect him personally.
	In fact, I couldn't think of one argument I could give him for
voting, because his reasons for not voting were unassailable. As he
said, none of it touched him personally. He is part of the me-first, me-
second, me-forever, me-me-me-me generation. The fact that the outcome of
an election might affect others doesn't matter to him, because those
people don't matter to him.
	What I dislike most about these kinds of insulated me-me narcissists
is that when things get rough, they are the first to whine that somebody
ought to do something to straighten things out. They're the first to
look around frantically for somebody, anybody to take care of them.
	But in the meantime, he's getting his, and what happens to others is
of no concern. So he sneers that politics is outside the mainstream.
What he doesn't recognize is that he is the one on the outside.
	Hopefully, he'll stay there.
	
	(C) 1992 BY THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
	DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.