I haven’t voted for years. I don’t talk about it much either. Last ballot I cast was before Obama–McCain. I couldn’t vote for either one of them, and I meant it.
We had a family over from church and voting came up. They could not understand why I wasn’t going to the polls. I told them I couldn’t, in good conscience, vote for either candidate. I didn’t trust either one.
I’ll never forget their arguments for Obama. One still sticks: he was going to be “the president of the world.” Then they hit me with, it’s your constitutional obligation. I told them I’d spent twenty years in the Navy as a submariner defending this country and its Constitution, and that I figured I’d earned the right not to vote for somebody I couldn’t support. I haven’t voted since.
That wasn’t apathy. That was refusal. A lot of folks treat voting like a religious duty. Show up, pick a team, don’t ask hard questions. I’m Eastern Orthodox — I know what real obligation looks like, and a bad ballot isn’t holy just because it’s Tuesday in November. The Constitution protects my liberty. It does not require me to endorse a man I can’t trust.
What keeps pushing on that old decision is what I see at work.
I work IT at a school. I’ve sat in classrooms fixing machines and listened to teachers unload on America, the Constitution, and capitalism — not careful debate, vitriol. Students soak that up for years. Then everybody acts surprised when young people drift toward the Democratic Socialists of America and start talking like free enterprise is the enemy and collectivism is kindness.
A lot of these kids don’t remember what communism actually did. China is still a communist country, even when it rents capitalist tools under a hard state. The USSR is a chapter, if that. Cuba and Venezuela get painted as good places that only struggle because the United States won’t leave them alone. That’s a nice story for a classroom. It’s a dishonest one in real life. Empty shelves, repressed speech, and people risking everything to leave aren’t American inventions. They’re what you get when the party owns the future.
I hear the DSA talk. I’ll write more on that another day. For now: hard times don’t make communism gentle. If you vote for communists — or for people who talk like communists with the serial numbers filed off — you’re not voting for fairness. You’re voting for tougher times with fewer exits.
And it’s out in the open now. I’ve seen people wearing the hammer and sickle, talking about how great communism is and how capitalism is holding everybody back. Not as a costume joke. As a badge. As if that symbol didn’t stand for secret police, famines, prisons, and a body count that ought to end the romance.
Capitalism isn’t perfect. Anybody with eyes can see greed and cronyism and people who get left behind. We can argue that in a free country. Communism doesn’t leave that argument alone for long. It puts the state over the person and calls obedience solidarity.
It didn’t turn out so well for the Bolsheviks. It didn’t turn out well for the people in Castro’s inner circle either. Revolution eats its own. The kids in the hammer-and-sickle shirts never seem to get that part of the lesson.
There’s a personal piece too.
My son is in his mid-thirties. He and about ten friends have a voting party. They gather, they form a consensus, and then everybody is expected to vote that way. If somebody speaks for another path — another judgment, another ticket — they don’t get a debate. They get humiliated. Badly.
That’s not citizenship. That’s a loyalty test. Same spirit I hear in some classrooms: there’s a correct opinion, and if you don’t share it, you’re not thoughtful — you’re the problem. When adults need a pile-on to keep their friends in line, don’t tell me it’s about saving the country. It’s about enforcing a team.
Here’s the part that really gets me, because I travel.
Young people in this country are being taught — and many truly believe — that the United States is bad. Bad history, bad system, bad people, take your pick. Then I go almost anywhere I’ve been — Portugal, Spain, Kenya, Peru, Italy, Egypt — and nearly everyone I actually talk to still sees America as the place they want to be. Not utopia. The destination. The chance.
So which story is true? The one sold in some American classrooms, or the one you hear from people who don’t have the luxury of hating a country they’d give anything to enter?
I still don’t love voting. I went a long time believing that withholding my vote was the honest answer when nobody on the ballot deserved it. I still believe you shouldn’t vote for someone you can’t look in the mirror about.
But I work around students who are told America is the villain. I see the hammer and sickle worn like fashion. I watch my son’s generation turn elections into humiliation rituals. I’ve heard foreigners speak of this country with a hope some of our own kids have been trained out of.
So I’ll keep watching. And if I have to vote this year, I will — not because church company told me I owed a candidate a ballot, and not because any party owns me. I’ll vote because I don’t want the loudest people in the room to be the only ones deciding what this place becomes. I spent twenty years under the water for this Constitution. I’m not interested in watching the next generation get taught that freedom was the problem all along.