Enjoy this newsletter? Gimme $2/mo. This is labor.

This week’s question comes to us anonymously:

Is voting an illusion?

Short answer, ehhhhh… no. Voting is real. Too many people have died for the right to vote for me to make light of it. The fact that millions of people are willing to wait in line, many of them under threat of harassment (both physical and bureaucratic) to get their vote counted makes it real. Very real. The fact that so many terrible people in power spend so much energy trying to keep people from voting also tells me that voting is very real. And something that scares them.

I get why you feel frustrated by the process though. I sometimes share in your frustration. But as a naturalized citizen who had to jump through a few mild hoops and wave a little flag in order to get the right to vote, I still take pride in the act of voting, if not so much with the choices of who or what to vote for.

The problem isn’t the voting. It’s everything around the voting. Everything from the names that get printed on the ballots, to how those names are chosen, the money that puts those names there (and the lack of money that keeps other names off), and then how those votes are cast, collected, and counted. With a side of gerrymandering, as a treat.

But I want to talk to you about another kind of voting today. Because while I agree that voting is real, and you should aim to do it, I also don’t want to have a discussion about elections. Which is what we end up talking about when we talk about voting. (I also don’t want to start an argument about how it’s our duty to vote for the candidate who wants to commit genocide with a sad face versus the candidate who wants to commit genocide with a scowl on their face, and I won’t berate people for withholding their vote from candidates that want to bomb their family. We can save that argument for another day.)

Here’s the truth about voting: We vote every day. Which is not to say that the voting that typically happens on November 4 isn’t important, it is. But what I’m saying is the voting you do on the other 364 days of the year are just as important, if not—in some ways—more so. Because in America, the biggest ballot box is the cash register, and in America you vote with your dollar. I want to talk about where we’re putting our dollar.

To see how quickly the oligarch class threw democracy under the bus in order to continue doing business as usual should be enough to disabuse you of the notion that they care about democracy in the least. To see how quickly the tech oligarchs caved to fascism in order to get the deregulation they needed to continue inhaling profit they’ve long ago stopped needing should disabuse you of the notion that they saw democracy as anything but a feel-good fantasy they were willing to entertain because, sure why not.

The honest truth is that the collapse of American Democracy™ hasn’t had much of an effect on people in power. They’re still in power. And sure, Tim Cook might not exactly enjoy flying to DC to kiss the ring, show up with lucite awards, and sit in a private screening room (which has to reek of Big Mac farts pressed through a syphilitic tube) to watch Melania, but he’s going to do it because it’s the new price of doing business in America. Chuck Schumer wishes he was majority leader of the Senate—it looks good on a résumé, I suppose, and who doesn’t want to be Top Boy—but the difference between AIPAC donations to Senate Majority Leaders and Senate Minority Leaders is fairly negligible. Chuck’s doing fine. And he sure as shit isn’t putting those contribution checks in danger because you had a bad day of being murdered by ICE goons. (Have you tried not being murdered by ICE goons?)

Most of the people in power were willing to do away with the fantasy of democracy as long as capitalism kept chugging along. Capitalism is the true cornerstone of what makes America America. Because in America, the biggest ballot box is the cash register.

We need to be more mindful of where we are putting our dollar.

I was fifteen years old when the ET video game for the 2600 came out in 1982, very shortly on the heels of the movie. (Some of you reading this are old enough that you just got angry.) For those not familiar, this video game was the most shoddily-made piece of cash-grab garbage that had ever entered our young lives. It was unplayable. It scarred us. I still bring it up in therapy. Also, that fucking game also cost $30 and at fifteen years of age you either got those $30 from your parents or by saving up $30, which in 1982 took shoveling the snow from six houses. Which meant that you weren’t getting another game for a while. I myself didn’t get an ET game at the time because I didn’t have an Atari 2600 yet. But my friend Rob did. He put thirty of his dollars down on an ET game. So we’d hang out in his basement trying to make ET eat his fucking Reese’s Pieces and see if this was maybe the time the game did what it was supposed to do, which of course it didn’t because it was a badly coded piece of shit. Nevertheless, we persisted because to admit that it didn’t work was to admit that he had put his thirty dollars on something stupid.

A few months later, after I’d finally persuaded my parents into getting me a 2600, I walked into Toys R Us and there was an endcap mountain of ET cartridges for $1. I remember staring at them, arching my short body’s neck up to see the top of the mountain, and thinking “well, it’s only a dollar” before snapping out of it and remembering how much that game sucked and no, it was not getting my dollar.

I was reminded of all this as I left the house this morning and ran into my neighbor who was telling me he was in the market for a new car. He mentioned that he really wanted an EV, which is a reasonable thing. Then, lowering his voice just a little bit, mentioned that used Teslas were going for about five dollars. And suddenly I was back at Toys R Us staring at a mountain of ET cartridges and thinking fuck no, that is still too much. That is not where you should put your dollar.

San Francisco can tell me it is a progressive city all it wants to, but when I ride my bike I see evidence that it’s simply not true. Because I can see how you’ve voted with your dollar. I see that you were willing to give your dollar to a nazi transphobe that defunded USAid and killed 22 million people in the process.

“But we didn’t know he was like that.”

Yes we did.

Every time we shop at Target we are supporting a company that dismantled all its DEI and Pride initiatives before they were even threatened with anything. They caved ahead of the curve. (The fact that Target headquarters is in Minneapolis should fill everyone on the board of that company with a lifelong shame.) Every time we walk into a Home Depot or a Lowe’s we’re supporting a company that gives ICE a reach-around every time they pull into their parking lot. Every time we share a Substack we’re supporting a company that’s built fascism into the core of its business model. Every time we walk into a Starbucks we’re giving our dollar to union busters. Every time we install a Ring camera from Amazon on our front door we are putting an ICE agent between us and our neighbors. Every Uline order you place is a bullet in the gun of an ICE agent.

You cannot complain about all the retail vacancies in town while also getting thirty Amazon packages delivered to your door every week.

You cannot complain all the restaurants are closing when you’re ordering all your meals from UberEats ghost kitchens.

This list could go on forever.

Every dollar we put down is a ballot cast for the values of the organization that we’ve handed it to.

More importantly, when we put our dollars there, we don’t have that dollar anymore. We no longer have a dollar that we can give to our local hardware store, to our local coffee shop, to the trans-inclusive Girl Scout troop, to a rent relief fund in Minnesota. We’ve already voted.

We gotta be better voters.

What we’re seeing in Minneapolis right now is the strength of community. People with a strong core of decency—who probably disagree on a lot of things—coming together and looking out for one another. And we’ve all seen a lot of photos of what’s happening on the ground. And in those photos there are storefronts. And in those storefronts there are signs telling ICE to get the fuck out of their town, and telling their neighbors that they are welcome there. These are the places where you should put your dollar. These are the places where you should place your vote. The same community that will look out for you when you need it. And I fear that we will all need it, if not against the current madness then a madness yet to come. And let me also make sure to say that community is not necessarily geography. The people of Minneapolis are our community, wherever we might be. And we are theirs.

We need to vote for each other. We need to put our dollar where it best feeds our community because in America, the biggest ballot box is a cash register.

To finish off the ET story, the majority of Atari ET cartridges eventually went unsold. On September 26, 1983, Atari buried 700,000 game cartridges in a landfill outside Alamogordo, New Mexico. I remember hearing this as a rumor when I was a kid. The great ET Landfill. We wanted desperately to believe it was true, because that fucking game stole our thirty dollars and we were still angry. But this was before the internet, so who knew whether it was just wishful thinking or not. In 2014 it was verified. The landfill is real! And while not all 700,000 cartridges were ET cartridges, many of them were. (A lot were Pac-Man, which also sucked, but it was at least mildly playable.)

The things you refuse to put your dollar on, the things you refuse to vote for, will eventually end up buried, lost to time. I hope to some day visit the ET Landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico but when I do I hope to also see the Tesla Landfill next to it, and the Ring Camera landfill next to that, and the Harry Potter Landfill next to that (because fuck JK Rowling), and the ICE equipment landfill next to that. (With apologies to the people of New Mexico. Maybe we should spread these around.)

Oligarchs like Tim Cook and Elon Musk have shown us their ass. But when you show someone your ass you end up also exposing your neck. America has one neck, and it’s capitalism. Which runs on your dollar. If you want to change how America works, change where you’re putting your dollar.

Change your vote.

🙋 Got a question for me? Ask it. Please. I love questions.

📓 Pre-order my new book How to die (and other stories). It’s a collection of the best stories from this newsletter in a handsome nice-to-hold hardback book.

❤️‍🩹 I asked a friend in Minneapolis who needed immediate help and she immediately sent me a link to the Afghan Cultural Society. They’re helping detainees and their families. Do what you can.

📣 The next Presenting with Confidence workshop is February 19 and 20. A few seats left. It will either help you get a job, or make your current job suck less.

🍉 The genocide in Gaza continues. Please help if you can.

🏳️‍⚧️ Our trans friends and family need help as well.