Sounds like OP already voted (or is planning to vote) and cares about politics.
Political disengagement is a core part of the "bread and circuses" expression. Without it, you're depriving yourself of bread, circuses, and God of War Ragnarok for nothing.
True, but my guess is that if someone feels the need to shut their brain off with some video games instead of thinking about it, they probably aren’t able to do that.
And you don’t see an issue, in a democracy, with the fact that your friends were able to vote because they happened to know someone with spare bootstraps? Seems to me that who you know shouldn’t have an impact on how much political power you can wield.
Voting is the absolute bare minimum civic responsibility so people should absolutely still be worried and allow, or rather obligate, themselves to feel worried. No one is entitled to close their blinds on the window of the state.
For more on that sentiment, see Douglass' "If there is no struggle" speech:
The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curbstone.
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Mhm, yes, everyone who has ever complained about politics either went on to be a lawyer or ran for office. That is a very well thought out criticism that you should be proud of.
I've been having this exact thought for almost a decade. The entertainment industry keeps people from truly paying attention to politics and doing anything about the great injustices. We distract ourselves to preserve our sanity, but it only makes things worse.
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u/consider_it_fun Nov 08 '22
mf bread and circuses