I feel like voting is one of the least effective forces through which policy and politicians are made or broken.
Money is the strongest of those forces, and also the one most antithetical toward protecting the environment and keeping the masses healthy, happy, educated and free.
Protest is unreliable, but do enough of it for long enough and it does tend to get shit done… eventually… after lots of struggle and suffering. So much of the social progress we have made has been through protest, through shaming society (and its leaders) into recognizing that the status quo they are so comfortable with is WRONG and must be changed.
But as the OP says, there are multiple time-critical crises, and the voting booth will give us either (A) pretending they don’t exist and do exactly the opposite of what we need to fix them, or (B) wringing our hands and making ineffectual low-effort gestures, while being careful not to provoke the wrath of those who hold the purse strings.
Whoever wins, whoever loses, in 2016 and 2018 and 2020, we have to get up in their faces and make them pay attention. It probably won’t be enough, but it is all we can do.
