Interesting. You have to choose your battles, and I chose mine decades ago, in a different direction. One cannot do everything; it’s a simple fact of life.
This reminds me of the Asimov robot story, Little Lost Robot, in which robots were modified so that the First Law of Robotics, “no robot may injure a human being or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,” was changed to omit the second phrase. Of course all of these stories were morality tales, IMO, and this one dealt with the question: “is failure to prevent a terrible deed as bad as doing the terrible deed?” So am I as bad as torturers for failing to prevent the torture? I can see if I were right there, and had the power to immediately stop the torturer, I would be morally obligated. But I do vote, and hope that the candidate I vote for will stop doing this (and lots of other) horrible things. I can’t feel like a bad person for only doing that. Sure there are things in between, like protests, and activism. I’m not built to do that sort of thing (for a number of reasons). So I put my energies into doing something I can do.
So in reply, I can say that I agree it’s our civic responsibity to try to change things. But to say that I am personally responsible for all the terrible actions of my government, I can only disagree.
