Stupor Tuesday and my vote.

When I was a kid, my parents taught me to pay attention to politics.
Learn how the country works and how to participate in it, they said.
That's what makes you a real citizen.

Three months before I was old enough to vote, Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election.
Not long after that, Michael Douglas appeared on the big screen and declared, "Greed is good," and it was pretty much all over right then and there. My adulthood had been decided for me before I was out of the gate.

You can understand why I could see the long path before me and know that I would never be a real citizen. I knew then that I was consigned to the dung heap of the American electorate, and that almost no one who represented my interests would ever make it into public office. The few who did would be laughed at, investigated, threatened and otherwise hamstrung.

Nothing has changed.
It hasn't mattered whether I voted or not, except the year I lived in a very small town and cast my vote for a new youth rec center. I knew that my vote mattered because it passed by only twenty votes (in a town of 1,600). It mattered because the opponents demanded a recount, which narrowed the difference to two votes. Then City council couldn't find the money to build it and that was that.

When you don't have money, you can't do a whole lot within the confines of the system, which is set up to help people without money fail.

I stopped voting for seven years in my twenties, disgusted with how broken the system already was.

I vote now as an act of camouflage, a way to show that I'm a meek, obedient citizen. But I no longer believe, living as I do in a big city, that my vote can actually prevent the shitshow that is coming on November 5th.

Yes, Joe Biden IS too old to run again. His stance and his words clearly illustrate it.
No, Kamala Harris probably won't be his running mate again, because this racist country has had enough of black leadership in the White House for a long while.
And yes, Donald Trump will probably be President again. Because his existence serves the interests of too many old, rich white guys behind the scenes, and the Council for American Policy, and everyone else with a finger in the wealthy elite pie.
The United States is on the way to becoming a failed state.
And because of How Things Are, NATO countries will almost certainly not come to our aid when the heavily armed part of Redneck Nation finally gathers en masse to show off its firepower.

Being a poor Jewish dyke will get me killed if I don't die of natural causes, even here in so-called "liberal" Oregon.

I will vote, and then I will drink. Because at least there's still some booze in the house.
But don't ask me to feel proud, or to celebrate my freedom, or any of that crap.
Because no one is free unless we all are, and the powers-that-be have made damned sure that some of us will never be free.

God bless America. May I die before she does.