politics

Do what instead of voting?

Depends heavily on what kind of problems you're facing at home. In my home town of Houston, the state government has hijacked the school board of HISD and imposed a bunch of shitty rules and regs, designed to waste money and torture kids. So I joined my local PTA. We go to meetings and harass/shame the bureaucrats involved. We reach out to the teachers and administrators who are under the gun to enforce these policies and offer them our support. There was a picket of the school district's office in October for instance.

Direct action - refusing to comply with harmful public policy, harassing public officials who are advocating and endorsing this policy, and getting other parents and teachers on board with alternative policy that you can implement outside the scope of the administration - is an effective means of undermining an unelected bureaucracy appointed by a corrupt state government.

I truly believe that if every person who complained about politics spent as much time voting as they did complaining, we’d have a more representative government.

There's more to politics than complaining. You need workable alternative and you need a popular consensus. Ten different people all pulling in ten different directions won't affect any kind of change. But ten activists with a shared understanding and vision, pulling in the same direction can.

We complain about a government that is corrupt, run by the wealthy as if we’re not the ones who put them there.

We're not. Far more often, it is the wealthy and well-organized interest and advocacy groups that put these people in power.

Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton aren't rogue agents who just kinda bubbled up from a political morass. They are the direct beneficiaries of large social mobilizations - O&G lobbying groups paid for with overpriced fossil fuels, large religious organizations like Houston's Second Baptist Church and Lakewood Church which galvenize masses of people along socially conservative political issues, doctors and lawyers and real estate associations and car dealership clubs who have formed cartels designed to guarantee higher salaries. One of the most politically active people in my community is Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale, a local celebrity businessman with a penchant for hookers and blow and QAnon conspiracy bullshit. This guy single-handedly bankrolls half a dozen talk-radio shock jocks with his advertising money and influences hundreds of thousands of my neighbors. Another is Dr. Peter Hoetz, a close personal friend of Dinesh D'Souza, who helped produce "2000 Mules" a documentary about how Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump.

Knowing who these people are and how they influence the body politick is instrumental in understanding where and how public opinion is crafted and distributed. If you're just showing up to the polls every two years and praying that Truth Will Prevail, you're walking to the slaughter. Only by recognizing who these assholes are, how they're seeding conspiracy theory and bigotry into the public domain, and where they fucking live so you can put a few rocks through their windows, can you discourage them from continuing.