Reply #133: You are arguing from a position of privilege [View All]

[noamnety]

and trying to make the case that only those with a certain sort of privilege should be granted the additional privilege of voting.

Sorry, but I'd rather stand with the less privileged when it comes to picking our leaders. Most of our history has been the privileged deciding which even more privileged person should govern the rest of us. It's destroying the planet.

Having privilege doesn't necessarily make you "brave". A poor black woman descended from slaves with an abusive spouse and no safety net, I'll wager, has a lot more courage than some rich white guy born into wealth. You can cast around the victim label all you want at the poor black woman, but I know which one I'd rather have pick our government. When Cynthia McKinney was fighting for democracy, the rich white guys were standing around wringing their hands scared to say anything, lest their precious careers were going to be damaged if they said something unpopular.

(The two largest groups who voted against the Iraq War Resolution, incidentally, were also minority groups: The Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. I don't think that was a statistical fluke.)

You have a sort of libertarian vision of how life theoretically is which has nothing to do with how life REALLY is. In real life, a public vote doesn't mean a person votes their conscience - and we should have seen that in by now. A public vote means people do what they need to, to protect their asses, and that doesn't matter whether you are an abused woman or some greedy parasite who cares more about getting re-elected than about whether or not we're about to kill another half million children someplace. And in real life, people have no concerns about being ugly, petty, and putting their prejudices on display. We can't even get through a day on DU without seeing that again and again. Try starting a thread about immigrant rights, if you need a reminder.