Overcast. 62 degrees. I'm going to stay in and read. We're doing our taxes this weekend. I wonder how many tens of dollars I made last year?!

Yesterday in my car I found myself thinking about my friends who don't vote, and I realized I have two thoughts on that front:

(1) If you're not following what's going on in the world, then please don't vote.
(2) It's totally okay for people to not follow what's going on in the world. That's our right as free people, isn't it? It's a privilege to live in a country where you're not confronted with the government when you walk down the street. And in my opinion that's why most of my friends aren't voters. They don't own houses, so they don't pay property taxes and so they're not concerned with how taxes are spent. (Also, most of them are sneaky with their taxes and write off all kinds of things they shouldn't, which is what most people do and which I find really annoying but that's a whole other subject.) Then there's the whole Posse Comitatus Act, which further shields us from having to deal with the US government (in military form) on a daily basis.

So back to my point. I was thinking, as I was driving around, that I was going to quit supporting the gripers who go on ad nauseum about low voter turnout, because I think it's just a natural part of living in an open, free society.

Of course, the problem is that the people who DO have to deal with the government every day are either (a) the extremely poor people who depend on government services and/or sign up for the military to escape poverty and (b) the extremely rich people who are taxed 30-40%. And the latter, of course, have a lot more power than the former. But most people in the middle don't care enough to speak up.

So now I'm back to thinking people should pay more attention. And that's my MO: I tell myself to be a moderate, to listen to all sides, to ignore conventional wisdom. But CW is conventional for a reason, sometimes. And you can see both sides of something in a way that keeps you from thinking that people who don't vote are just fucking morons who are ruining the country without actually having to agree that their position is just.

Right?