If you vote, then you can’t complain about the results. Every election year, an old maxim comes back from the dead to haunt everyone over the age of 18: “If you don’t vote, you lose the right to complain*”. But really, how does that work?
You vote, your candidate loses, you complain that the results are rigged. You vote, your candidate wins but turns out to be an incompetent fool, you complain that he is a liar and a hypocrite. Frankly, if you voted you should keep your mouths shut and accept the consequences.
Politicians and bureaucrats are not evil specimens working to undermine your trust. They are ordinary human beings like you and me. They come from your schools, your churches, your hospitals, your stores. And sometimes, they even come from your own home.
And who elects these individuals to power? Who gave them the mandate to abuse and misuse? Who is really to blame for the exonerations of the misgivings of our leaders? Not the banks. Not the corporations. Not the military. Not foreign or domestic foes. Certainly not God. They are just scapegoats for the real perpetrators.
It’s us. The general public. We, The People.
It’s time that we need to stop blaming anything and everything other than ourselves for putting people we don’t like into office. Shifting such responsibility away from us makes us look just as bad as those officials. As much as we need to hold our elected representatives accountable for their deeds, we need to hold ourselves accountable for voting them in. If we do, the harder it will be for some of them to sabotage our trust in the name of democracy.
This is not to say you shouldn’t vote. You should. But think very hard and deeply about that person you are voting for, and about yourself. You voted. You lost. Get over it. You voted. You won but later regret it? Deal with it. Didn’t vote? There’s always the next election and the election after that. If you’re lucky.
*This quote has been misattributed to George Carlin, who actually said the opposite: “If you vote, then you have no right to complain.”
"And I voted, too!"