Voting seems nearly pointless these days, what with Bush taking office anyway, despite someone else getting the majority of votes. I don’t have any confidence that the vote I enter will be the vote that gets counted. I’m going to vote anyway, but out of orneriness. I don’t know about you, but this voter doesn’t have any confidence when it comes to the ballot.
I’ll tell you the vote I *do* have confidence in, however. As far as I can see, the only unusurpable vote I have is the one I make every day with my dollar. I decide who lives and dies every single time I buy something. If I buy gasoline, at any price, I’m casting my vote. I’m saying, "Yes, this is acceptable. More of the same, please!” If I buy a Hostess Ding Dong instead of an apple, I’m saying, “Yes, more Ding Dongs and less apples!” If I buy bakery bread in paper instead of buying mass produced bread in a plastic wrapper, I’m casting my vote for bakery bread in paper.
If I hear that Kelloggs is using GMO strawberries in their Special K, I can say, “I’m never going to buy that shit again!” and when I don’t, I’m casting my vote. If I think everything, or even just the majority of what Hostess makes is utter poison, I can refuse to support their company by not buying any of their products. If enough likeminded people decided the same thing, we could topple Hostess in a very short time. We could utterly put them out of business and get rid of Ding Dongs forever. Ding Dongs wouldn’t even look like good business to scavenger companies because, hey… it didn’t work so well for Hostess.
If we wanted to change the face of fuel forever, we could take our power back and decide what price we were willing to pay for gasoline and never buy any above that price. If no one ever bought any above the acceptable price, the price would either have to be lowered to the acceptable price, a cheaper alternate would have to be created, or the fuel source would find another market. (Heh, like the public transportation we’d all be taking lol)
If no one ever bought hose clamps at a certain price, then the price would go down until they started selling. If they found the selling point, but couldn’t stay alive at the price, they’d design a cheaper hose clamp or make it out of cheaper materials, or use cheaper labor, etc., but they couldn’t continue to make a product that no one was buying.
If we thought white bread was "teh evol", we could just stop buying it and it would go away. If no one bought white bread at any price, white bread would go the way of the dinosaur. Companies would stop making it and would make more of the kinds of breads that *did* sell.
This is the vote we cast with our dollars. This is the power of the penny. The unusurpable vote we have. Sure, the big food companies run expensive ad campaigns in our faces every day trying to steer our votes, but at the end of the day, we still buy whatever we want.
