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Why Can't I Vote?
for release 11-04-05
Wahington D.C.
I was sitting down to write this column when the doorbell rang. It was a personable young man who was going door to door campaigning for a local candidate. He was wearing a badge with his name and the candidate's name on it. He looked you straight in the eye. I would have voted for his man.
The only problem is that I can't vote. My right to the ballot has been stripped from me due to our preposterous drug laws. So, I sent the young man off to the next door where perhaps the occupant was not disenfranchised.
OK, I was a bad boy. I broke the law and I knew it was the law, even though I didn't agree with it and they caught me. My bad. Not for breaking the law, which was my moral duty, but for letting them catch me.
All over the country people are coming to their senses in the matter of drug prohibition. Just this week Denver passed a local measure to ignore enforcement of laws against possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use.
Several states have allowed medical marijuana. Of course this is the proverbial camel's nose under the tent. To maintain the fiction that marijuana is harmful is becoming more and more absurd and harder to sell. And no matter how obdurate the Federal government remains with regard to the people's expressed will with regard to marijuana decriminalization, the local rules will start to prevail as they always do.
All of this makes very little difference to me. I'm going to smoke it no matter what the local rules are. I smoked it in jail after they arrested me for smoking it. It's part of my religion. It's part of god and nature. It grows, and I smoke it. Simple. If it comes down to a choice between smoking or voting, I'll take smoking.
Sure I would like to be able to vote. It's the mark of citizenship, the symbol of our participation in this rather warped democracy where things are ultimately decided in board rooms and by surveys and opinion polls rather than at the ballot box. Even before I lost my right to vote I lost my belief in the relevance of the ballot box. If I had voted a hundred times in the 2000 presidential election it wouldn't have mattered because the only votes that counted in that election were the votes of Scalia and Thomas and Reinquist.
Now the Bush administration is touting the amazing success of the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq. To be sure the voter turnouts in both elections were higher than those in our own country, but just waving a purple dyed finger in the air does not a democracy or a free society make. Elections are mostly for ceremonial purposes. They give each voter the sense that he has participated in some small way to decide his own fate. It's an illusion of course. Money and position and power decide things.
The Poet's Eye can only look, it can't participate. I don't have the right to vote, so I must vote with my writing.
"We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate."
- Thomas Jefferson
