” I was told in the household that I grew up in that the community that you come out of, you should give back to, and that’s something that’s valued in my household – Talib Kweli ”
The Nov 4th midterm elections, resulted in the Republicans winning the senate control with seven seats, and the number one questioning was – the decline in voter turn out? Of course the republican were rejoicing over their victory and while the most voters [old and young] show up in higher numbers at the ballots during the Presidential election, there is much work that is undone at the local and community level.
So Does Voting Really Matter, & Should People Vote At Each Election?
Rapper, Talib Kweli appeared on RT news to talk about the political plot of the voting system, and why he is not an avid voter. Unlike most rappers, today Talib believes that most rappers are ‘conformist’ and
On Voting:
” I don’t believe that the vote is what they tell us it is. And yes, I’ve come out of the idea of voting without knowing the facts, without having to grasp what the candidates represent. I have voted in the past, and I’ll probably vote in the future, but I’m not one of those people who feel like you should vote all the time and because people died for the right to vote, you should.”
On The Prison Industrial Complex & It’s Direct Target On People Of Color:
” Well, Prison is for profit and you know America,… a small group of people get rich off of imprisoning people and the labor, and the jobs it creates in these towns and stuff. This is a country that was built on slave labor. It’s sort of like the backbone of this country is that we have an ‘intrinsic’ value system that celebrates giving people nothing and extracting everything from them, and because of it we’ve become the greatest country in the world. “
” So when slavery was ended, America naturally formed a replacement for Slavery, and the fact that it’s mostly people of color who are dealing with this prison industrial complex is not at all a coincidence. It is the new Jim Crow error . When Michelle Alexander wrote that book, she was saying things in an academic way what people in the streets and in the hood were knowing and feeling in their hearts but she just expressed it in a way where people was able to say: I see the connection. “
In a recent article by Mat Catastrophe he says that voting is a simple reminder that A) there’s still a lot of work to be done to defeat “the other side” or B) the other side won and the struggle to defeat them must never stop.
” Over the years, I’ve taken a good bit of heat from people on my refusal to vote. I’ve heard all the arguments for why I should — I’ll get to those in a bit — and I’ve been told time and again that I can’t be taken seriously if I don’t exercise my right to vote.
I’ve never understood how that works. After all, if I vote and I don’t vote the way you think I should, won’t you still have problems taking me seriously? It’s a never-ending cycle of bad logic by people who want to believe, truly and deeply, that they have some say in what goes on in this country. And it’s just another grand part of the American myth, like the self-made man and the power of free markets. “
Read the rest HERE
Like all matters in the world, there will always be the pro’s and con’s. We’ve heard many times, ‘if you don’t vote’, then you don’t have a say’ but the truth is that there are many democrats and republicans ‘WINNING‘ in POWER and in RICHES doing just fine despite the final decision and the people didn’t just learned this when ABC’s Scandal Show appeared on our television screens. I think the overall lesson here is that we should all educate ourselves on the POLI-TRICKS and know when to participate and when to remove the blindfold.
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