Voting
Ol' Remus

Ol' Remus voted in local elections earlier this month. By local he means offices in the township, a place with fewer residents than the apartment building he lived in in Philadelphia. It's a rather large geographical area with a tiny, unincorporated hamlet embedded in it. "The Burg", as it's known, is an attractive, relatively prosperous place with an occasional new business or expansion of an existing business, but calm down, there's no danger of runaway growth. We're talking low-voltage stuff here. The town budget is of the same order as a stand-alone McDonald's franchise in bleakest Saskatchewan. The tallest building in the burg was four stories high, which burned down a hundred years ago. Until the gas station was built, the basement was covered over and used as an informal "downtown" shooting range. The gas station was then converted to various other businesses, which burned down this year. Now it's a parking lot with space for well over a dozen vehicles. Such was our lunge for the cosmopolitan.

Candidates in our local elections run mostly uncontested, or the same nominee appears on two or three ballot lines and so comes to the same thing. The politics part is run on an "everybody knows" basis, and yes, everybody does know. The real action takes place before the ballots are printed. Some say (oops) whoever draws the short straw is the nominee, and better luck next time. Other than a council seat or two, voting endorses a fait accompli. Being largely a matter of expressing consent, and a social event, turnout is heavy. Nearly complete. People notice the absentees. Elected officials are convincingly disguised as farmers and tradesmen and hourly workers during daylight hours. But roads get fixed, hydrants get flushed, mandatory standards are met, bills paid, audits passed. What needs doing gets done without a whiff of drama. It works.

What doesn't work is voting in national elections. If voting worked it would have worked by now. Whenever voting even looks like it will work it's savaged as if it were terrorist activity. Nope, sorry, national elections are a pump-and-dump fraud, voting confirms the payer so the checks can be cut.

There's only one legitimate schematic for national government and that is the Constitution. Vote all we want, when the plumbing of power is fraudulent there's no way to safely exercise our liberties. Until constitutional governance is restored the people are no more free than those of any other third-world peasantry living in any other strongman's pest-hole. Until constitutional governance is restored, everybody who participates is participating in a criminal enterprise; office holders, permanent government and voters alike.

So, here we are again. Or still. There's no picking up this turd by the clean end. We vote and vote and vote, yet totalitarian slugs can and do suspend constitutional guarantees due to the emergency du jour or to satisfy their current recipe for kozmik justice. And instead of having to get out of Dodge for their own protection, it sticks. Short version: they do these things because they can, and they can because we consent, and we consent because we vote.

This stuff will stop only with a repeat of the transformation that rocked the world in 1789—the first day of constitutional government. Voting hasn't worked for a very long time and it doesn't work now. Unless the serial treachery of the last hundred-plus years is undone, it isn't going to work in the future. Stop collaborating. Resist. Not voting is an act of resistance, one among many, and resistance works. Collaborating doesn't. Change begins with resistance. Not change we can believe in, that's exactly backwards, rather change they can believe in, the kind of change that makes toxic twits run from office rather than for it, the kind of change that puckers sphincters and focuses minds—serious change.

The fact is clear and obvious, all national and most state elections are bogus. The corruption has congealed and hardened in place, there is no viable way to significantly influence governance at those levels much less change it. Their elections are their elections, not ours. Nothing of consequence can be changed this way. Elections are a roadblock, not a road. Congressional districting and other election rigging ensures fewer seats are actually contested than were in the Politburo of their late and lamented USSR. Their federal judges routinely set aside state referendums that offend their personal sensibilities, one more avenue of redress criminally denied. Nobody should expect criminals to change their ways when they can prevent having to do it. It's their ball, their ballpark, their rules, their umpires, and they bat last.

Rebuilding the republic has to begin at lower levels, down where we actually live. It has to be an economic and political insurgency, an "insurgency" only because DC sees it that way. Discount anybody in national politics. Anybody. They can't possibly help. The better ones are merely imperfectly dissolved bits of the toxic soup. Some are admirable, sure, but that's all they are. Those few that don't roll over get used in other ways. Forget them. Resistance is the way and non-participation is resistance. Non-participation withholds any suggestion of consent. It denies them the appearance of legitimacy, the one thing they can't do without. The patriot's hand should shake with shame when signing the voting register. It's a stain on our honor that turnout for national elections isn't where it rightfully belongs—zero.

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