It’s Election Day as I write this, which means another cascade of posts from friends and acquaintances about how they’re trying to be optimistic but they can’t trust the same country that brought us President Boatmurder, how they know they should just stay away from political content all day long but they won’t be able to, how they’re biting their nails or picking at their cuticles or doing other kinds of controlled self-harm¹ in order to distract themselves from the horrors of living in a dying empire, especially one whose democracy is clearly subservient to outsized billionaire spending and rich manchildren throwing temper tantra.

Good.

That sounds condescending, and it is, and it’s meant to be, but it’s also sincere. The cockles of my heart are in garbage condition these days, and I can’t afford new ones (tariffs, you know) but if they were brand-new, I daresay they’d be warmed by this kind of fear.

Not because I want my friends and acquaintances to be scared, but because citizens in a democracy have the responsibility to care for it, whether that means casting ballots, running for office, yelling at politicians, or, occasionally, sending a few Supreme Court justices to jail for truly blatant corruption.

Unlike Alan Jackson, I am a real political man.² I grew up having and hearing arguments about politics, memorizing dumb chants, and researching and learning policy positions. This isn’t to say I was an intelligent participant in democracy: I got my opinions the same way my charges do (i.e., from my parents) and, obviously, I couldn’t vote yet.

Nonetheless, I got the sense, even as a child, that one day I would be able to vote, and my vote mattered because it made me a full citizen of Puerto Rico, and that meant I had a responsibility to care about how my government was chosen long before I could be an official part of the process.³ I suspect I was not alone in thinking this way: Where I come from, a turnout rate below 80%⁴ was once considered a mark of political crisis.

Of course, that was before PROMESA gave a fleet of handpicked gringo buffoons and their collaborators greater power over the island than any democratically elected official.⁵

In short, keeping your country on the democratic straight and narrow isn’t supposed to be a relaxing, or even necessarily rewarding, task. It certainly can be—Lula’s Army gamified and galvanized the left in Brazil just a few weeks ago—but that is not the default experience.

Leftist and liberal USians, with good reason, complain a lot about the way the media influences the democratic process: from horse-race articles that demand treating the insane babblings of a cowardly senile dipshit as co-equal with actual policy proposals and uncritical coverage of almost every genocidal and destructive movement in the country to their disgusting fawning over billionaires who insist on stopping the rest of us from having any control over them, the major informational organs of this country have a lot to answer for.

Yet I can’t help but feel that they should have to work a lot harder than they do to successfully propagandize a population that prides itself on its independent thinking and liberatory streak. It shouldn’t be as easy as it is to convince USians that Abdul El-Sayed must disavow the Muslim Brotherhood in order to be a real candidate, or that cities are crime-ridden hellholes, or that the United States military should get to summarily murder people on the high seas because they have scary Spanish-looking names.

Instead, as long as you put a Brown person (and you can pick what kind of Brown) on the other end of whatever crisis you invent, a substantial percentage of the population of the United States, perhaps even a plurality, perhaps even including people who would never in their lives identify as conservatives or right-wing or anything remotely like it, will fall for it. This from the country that thinks it’s manly to be afraid of needles.

I also can’t help but feel that the media’s insistence on covering politics like a spectator sport is, again, driven by the fact that for a lot of USians, it is. Sure, this candidate might make life harder come tax time, or that ballot initiative might have an effect on schools 20 years down the road, but in general, there won’t be a direct link between the red and blue bars you see after you vote and how much worse your life gets. That’s why you can look away, like you were watching the World Series instead of your country’s future.

A lot of USians, and a whole lot more of non-USians, don’t get that luxury. Instead, every time this rough beast slouches towards its slow and dreary imperial tomb, the political leaders of the United States paint entire areas of the world and their inhabitants as acceptable targets. They decide whose children get bombed, who gets to eat—hell, who gets to actually have a democracy. More than one friend of mine has advanced the proposal that everyone except USians should get to vote in US elections, and while I never disagreed, I agree all the more now.

Don’t mistake me for a voting purist, by the way: for me, an election is merely the populace setting the absolute minimum of abuse they’re willing to accept from capital. It’s afterwards that the real work begins, where you pressure the people you just elected to remember that, even if you have less money, there are more of you around. That realization is becoming part of USian politics—although it was much earlier, unsurprisingly, on the side that swallows capital’s bullshit—and it’s how you know a democracy is finally outgrowing its larval stage where it’s assumed that norms will hold forever.

His dictis, as mad as I get at people whose political calculators just have one button that says “BLAME NON-VOTERS,” I get the liberal impulse to place voting as the highest good for one very petty, selfish, unserious reason. José Martí lived in the monster, and knew its entrails; I work in its digestive tract, and I can see the waste it produces. I have to put up with it for several hours every day, grade its papers, avoid engaging with its uninformed crap, talk to its parents like they don’t consider me a fifth columnist because I speak more than one language, and watch it get treated with kid gloves by people who secretly agree with it. I like seeing it get annoyed that the rest of the country doesn’t believe in the same pat fascist crap as it does.⁶

To sum up: I won’t tell you what to do or not do on Election Day, especially not in a country that refuses to make it a national holiday because—surprise—the United States is about as real a democracy as I am a real heir to the throne of Jerusalem. But if you’re afraid to look away, if you find yourself glued to national coverage or Congressional maps, if your heart rate doesn’t go down for the next 24 hours, I want you to tell yourself not only that that is okay, but that it’s actually a good thing. Democracy shouldn’t be something that happens to other people, and it’s not a political system that rewards limited engagement. It’s a continuous practice, and USians in particular have been kept from thinking that for decades, to the benefit of some truly ghastly people.

Perhaps, 250 years in, USians are finally realizing that we do not win freedom by looking at pictures of George Washington and Ieshia Evans and casting a ballot every couple years, but by constantly engaging with a world whose fabric changes just as swiftly, and standing up for real liberty, liberty for all of us—and may no one be left behind—every moment of our lives.

Be safe, good luck, and let’s send these rat bastards packing forever.