Didn’t even need to click through to guess the author’s race an gender.
Do you what you want, fucker. But too many people got savaged by dogs, blasted with fire hoses, and hung from trees to get me into the voting booth for me to ever opt out.
Every time I see these people, I think of the time I accidentally (courtesy of a flight diversion) found myself in Athens, Greece, on the day of their general election in 1987. I was 14 years old.
The junta ruled from 1967 to 1974. The current democracy in Greece was *younger than me*
The Greek general election was not merely an expression of democracy, it was a celebration of it. Voting was mandatory and everyone seemed to think that was the way it should be.
Every hotel and bar TV screen was turned to the count.
Young men and women cruised around Athens...
...waving flags representing their party of choice out the windows, sounding their horns to represent the *ballot number of their candidate*.
We were exhausted and went to bed. At 2am the results came through. We know this because Athens cheered.
I have never heard an entire city cheer before or since. It was an experience.
Because they knew, they *remembered* what losing democracy was like.
I will always vote like the Greeks voted that day.
As their ancestors did!
In 5th century BC Athens, one HAD to vote in order to BE a citizen. If a person did not partake in the city's affairs, if they were not discussing how to run the city in the agora, if they did not VOTE, they were stripped of their citizenship.
Yes, and our democracy is somewhat influenced by their democracy, somewhat by some indigenous traditions we stole, and somewhat by the Althingr. The Althingr survives almost untouched in the European style of parliamentary democracy, though.
