{"id":891,"date":"2008-11-04T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2008-11-04T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stevepugh.net\/VTT\/?p=891"},"modified":"2008-11-04T12:00:53","modified_gmt":"2008-11-04T12:00:53","slug":"election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevepugh.net\/VTT\/2008\/11\/election\/","title":{"rendered":"Mandatory election post"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time I was sitting in a bar with some work colleagues and one of them told me I don’t vote. I leave it up to people like you who know about these things.<\/strong><\/q> At the time I was completely speechless but I’ve subsequently thought a lot about that statement and even though I’m not an American and hence have no vote, today is as good a day as any to mention this story.<\/p>\n

I was flattered that I was seen as someone that other people trusted to decide the shape of their government. I was intrigued that someone was apathetic, not because they felt ignored and alienated by politics, but because they felt under qualified to particpate. Mostly, however, I was shocked that someone would so easily throw away their democratic rights.<\/p>\n

When you have the opportunity to vote, vote. Vote because one candidate has better policies, or because the other candidate has dreadful policies, or because one candidate is a smarter, better person, or because the other candidate isn’t. You don’t have to justify why you vote the way you do to anyone other than yourself, so whatever criteria satisfies your conscience is good enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time I was sitting in a bar with some work colleagues and one of them told me I don’t vote. I leave it up to people like you who know about these things. At the time I was completely speechless but I’ve subsequently thought a lot about that statement and even though […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,11],"tags":[94,176,243],"class_list":["post-891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-life","category-the-world","tag-election","tag-politics","tag-usa"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s1fxq5-election","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevepugh.net\/VTT\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevepugh.net\/VTT\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevepugh.net\/VTT\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevepugh.net\/VTT\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevepugh.net\/VTT\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevepugh.net\/VTT\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevepugh.net\/VTT\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevepugh.net\/VTT\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevepugh.net\/VTT\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}