To vote, or not to vote, that is not the question
Whether ’tis nobler to boycott, sanction, alienate and isolate the tyrant, or to engage from below, and pit the bad against the worst to impress the Goliath, with the power of the pebble, democracy is by no means defined by the ballot or elections.
Far from a point of departure, the elections is an ideal aspiration, a destination at which the ballot shall validate a fragile democratic process.  A process with which majority rule is challenged by an official opposition on the one hand, and curbed by an obligation to respect and protect the minorities who lack the power of the majority, on the other.  To start with the ballot diminishes the power of the voter as much as it undermines the democratic process as a means to an end, liberty for all.
This deceiving appearance of idealism must at least give us pause to contemplate the calamity we face in the here and now.  “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them?”
The question is not the validity of the flawed ballot, as a means to spread the rot of the tyrant’s evil from within, or the symbolic protest in taking offence of an insult to the injury of decades old oppression through boycott.  The question is, are we dignified in our self respect, or do we prove true, the patronizing view of arrogant strangers who finds us backwards, barbaric and primitive?  So much so that they themselves submit to the indignity of molesting the fruits of their own centuries old labour.
The question is not, how we suffer or confront the tyrant’s evil, but how we face the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks from within.  Our own weakness or lack of desire to pay the true price of dignity, self respect and freedom.  To earn the fraternity of our fellow humans and respect their equality to ours.
“…Be all my sins remembered” while I steadfastly value my own dignity and cherish this contrarity.

bp

March 2016