Excerpts from an op-ed by a former journalist, David Tate, in today’s Roanoke Times newspaper.
I remember watching and waiting [in 2004] for the expected explosion to shake the morning calm. After all, this morning was the first time in this country’s history that the people of Afghanistan were voting in a free and arguably fair election.
I watched as thousands of women, and men, filled the streets to do something they had little concept of; all under the significant threat of violence.
People literally walked or rode donkeys for more than a week, each way, just to cast their vote. Braving the threat of violence that had already claimed the lives of more than a dozen election workers.
It was a concept so foreign — yet so powerful, that by the end of the election the UN estimated nearly 75 percent voter turnout of eligible voters; more than 8,000,000 people. If you compare numbers with the United States, Afghans should truly be proud.
FairVote puts typical American voter turnout for Presidential elections at roughly 60 percent. Mid-terms are even worse, registering roughly 40 percent. Both numbers highlighting the problem we, as a country, are currently facing: The fact that apathy is killing us.
That year in Afghanistan, 75 percent turned out, under the threat of death, just to be a part of a dream. People literally left their homes for nearly a month to make the journey. They didn’t know what it meant. All they knew was what it could mean.
At least in America, we know what is at stake.
• Stay home and watch your health care continue to disappear.
• Stay home and watch your Social Security get cut even more and your retirement age go up.
• Stay home and watch your child’s education continue to be gutted.
• Stay home and watch the dream of equal and civil rights slip away.
• Stay home and watch the Veteran’s Administration fail through privatization.
• Stay home and watch Medicaid get cut.
• Stay home and ignore the catastrophic path we, as humans, have put this earth on.
• Stay home and let a president with authoritarian tendencies consolidate his grip on our lives.
Apathy kills. What are you going to do about it?