A Recent Conversation on a popular Social site.

The following post was supposed to go up early this morning. Something else caught my attention, and had to be dealt with first. After spending two hours vomiting (both literally, and in the more prosaic meaning, by writing) over that something, I can now return to my planned schedule.

During a discussion of the overall perceived benefits and/or disadvantages of the OccupyWallSt. protests, one of the commenters made the following statement:
(When asking permission to quote that individual here, I promised anonymity. Edited for errors in formatting only.)


"There's a simple way to create change. It's called voting. I've heard commentary describing 23% of REGISTERED voters (not eligible voters, just the ones that took the time to get on the voter rolls) as a high turnout. In many other countries (Denmark, for example), 89% of ELIGIBLE voters would be considered a LOW turnout. Instead of getting in the way of traffic, get a bunch of people in each district to send their Representative AND Senator a petition simply stating something like "We the undersigned are voters in your district and have the following complaints about how you represent us. The corporate interest you favor supply 75 % of your campaign funding. We can supply 100% of the votes that will put in someone willing to actually represent us. Which do you need more?" The catch is, this works only if people follow up on it BY ACTUALLY VOTING"

My response:

"Your model is the ideal, not the reality. Yes, actually voting can make a small difference, but with all the so called Checks and Balances, your candidate is unable to be effective in office. For example: If Obama had not met resistance on his policies from Congress and the Senate, don't you think he would have been able to keep all his campaign promises? And then there's the lobbyists, whose job it is to pester the elected officials 24/7. Corporations are the only ones that can afford to apply that kind of political pressure to the elected. That's how the tax laws got where they are. That's how the labor laws got where they are. That's how the import tariffs got where they are. Voting gets "your guy" in office. If you can somehow find a way to vote for congress and senate in every state, then voting will do what you wish it did.

Then you have the opposing voters... 
I'm not racially biased, unless you count that horror called the Red Neck. Demagogue BELIEVERS.
A sound bite isn't policy. Especially when the sound bites are "We Need to be worried about the rise of Soviet Russia" (spoken this past summer [2011] by a GOP front runner...) and other phrases of equal intelligence. When people do their civic duty by doing more than JUST voting, but becoming educated about the facts, issues, and long term effects of policy, rather than just snippets of demagoguery, then we can sit home and depend on others to be as responsible as we."

At the time, I felt it was an important set of ideas to relate. Both the original post, as well as my response. But, the previously mentioned "something" has really knocked me for a loop.