Find Your Power

Some final Election Day thoughts.

I plan to post about Los Angeles and California election results in the next few days, but I wanted to share some thoughts about the state of the world.

In my voter guide, I made a point to write about who rights don’t apply to, especially when analyzing statewide propositions. Prop 6 would abolish prison slavery from our state constitution, but we know this won’t actually end slavery in California prisons. How? In 2018, Colorado voters approved a comparable measure. In the summer of 2023, an investigation uncovered 727 instances where the Colorado Department of Corrections wrote up incarcerated workers for failing to report to work or to do assigned work—even five years after the law had banned this practice.

In my mutual aid organizing, we regularly fight against the City and its contracted agencies violating unhoused people’s rights. Police across the country regularly violate rights, especially those of Black, disabled, and poor people.

We think of rights as inalienable, but that’s not the case. We are only guaranteed the rights we actively fight for.

I don’t write this from a place of nihilism, but I want to be clear: No one is coming to save you. Not Kamala Harris. Not The Squad. Not some miraculous scientific breakthrough. We have to save ourselves. 

We are socialized our entire lives to believe voting, specifically in presidential races, is our greatest power. I strongly disagree.

As a California resident, your vote in the presidential race is extremely diminished by the population of our state, by the electoral college, and by immense amounts of dark money. I obviously believe voting is important, hence my 100+ page voter guide. But please understand that your greatest power is the action you take. 

Regardless of who wins the presidency, collective action is the only way many people will survive corporate greed, fascism, and the climate crisis.

This is the seventh voter guide I’ve written. I used to write this guide because I wanted to explain how our government works. Now, I write to explain how our government does not work. Or more accurately, how it’s designed to not work for us. How it’s designed to perpetuate oppression, exploitation, and corruption. Voting will not change that. It’s up to you to act.

If you learned something in my guide that made you angry, go to the “Get Involved” section. Take a few minutes to browse through and see if there’s a group doing something about it. Then join!

These crises seem insurmountable, but together, we are powerful. Find your power.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K. Le Guin