
I find your comment funny because the person you’re responding to is not the one in denial. They gave you the statistical facts of the situation. I know you want to cynically point the finger at everyone around you being dumber and lazier than you, that you have it as hard as anyone could possibly have it and you managed to do it so why don’t they. I know you want to believe America is a democracy just because we hold elections and the votes that come in are counted.
When you have a third of the population that doesn’t vote for one reason or another, when you have some voters with several times the voting power of others, and the two candidates we get to vote for are donald fucking trump or the person that somehow lost to D.F.T.; it’s time to start thinking about the systems that produced those results instead of passing the blame off on bootstraps and personal responsibility. This is the classic reactionary rhetoric that never leads to anything being fixed, because it exists so you have something to be angry at without challenging anything fundamental to the system. Because you can change systems, you cannot change people except by giving them what they need to change themselves.
The good thing is that human behavior at that scale is actually reasonably predictable, again, given the material conditions that those people are subjected to. Which is why systems are so important.
A system does what it is designed to do, and benefits who it is designed to benefit. Everything else is just noise. Stop pointing the finger at everyone around you and start pointing it up at the people who actually have a direct hand in those systems and profound power to change them. Elected or otherwise. That is the only way that change has ever been wrought in this country, even in the most dire of circumstances.
Yep, classic chauvinism.