The Mike Rowe Truth about Get Out and Vote

I hoped to generate a discussion about the meaning of the word “efficacy” and why one should feel motivated to vote.  I once asked a college professor why a voter should be informed of anything since a voter simply marking circles beside random names couldn’t pick any worse people than all the informed voters in our history had done.

Excerpt from main article:  … “there’s nothing virtuous or patriotic about voting just for the sake of voting, and the next time someone tells you otherwise, do me a favor — ask them who they’re voting for. Then tell them you’re voting for their opponent. Then, see if they’ll give you a ride to the polls.”

Twenty-some years ago, my neighbor asked me along on a money-making housewife adventure she’d heard an ad for and called to verify.  We could be “paid” members of a group rating local radio stations, sponsored by an “unknown” radio station.  Since she only listened to ONE radio station, a local Christian station, I surmised that was the station sponsoring it because how else would she have learned of it?  I was also taking my required public relations and advertising classes in the Journalism program at OU, so I knew a bit about how the data for such surveys was gathered and used — and also understood built-in bias.

My neighbor drove to the assigned location at an abandoned mall-turned-telemarketing plaza, where we were to sit in a lecture style room with headphones on listening to radio segments of music for an hour or so.  Each of the hundred or so participants had buttons or dials on the desk in front of us to rate the music/host segment we heard on a scale of 1 to 10. I definitely wanted the 50 bucks for a couple hours of my Saturday, but I wasn’t the least bit interested in radio stations. I played CDs or cassette tapes when I drove (for you millennials?  Tapes are an ancient form of music recording device we listened to by candlelight in the olden days).  So, to entertain myself over the hour-plus session, I watched what my neighbor input with her buttons/dials and then made the opposite choice on my own input device.  If she entered 8, I entered 2. If she entered 10, I entered 0. When she entered 5, I alternated between 0 and 10 because to throw off a neutral always in one direction might have skewed my attempt to invalidate her inputs to the data set.  Anyway, when she was driving our rich selves home, she said that she had noticed that my tastes seemed to run exactly opposite hers. That if she really, really loved a song, I seemed to HATE it. I told her what I’d done, thinking she’d laugh.

She got really upset with me, claiming that I had no right to totally negate her vote. She said I had made her opinion count for nothing. I held up the two 50-dollar bills and told her it counted for this.  I said the only thing that counted to anyone in any sort of media survey was the money and that between us we got a hundred of it.  She said that she’d felt like her opinion was making a difference to the community.  She said that she felt like she would have been making Christian music more popular and that would mean a bigger ministry to reach people who needed to hear good wholesome music.  She had a sense of efficacy about her votes for the music we heard in that room that I couldn’t fathom.  I think that altered our relationship forever.  When we moved from Oklahoma, I didn’t even bother telling her goodbye and she may or may not have noticed.  We were neighbors for almost twenty years.  But the disconnect in our intellect was too great to overcome.  I don’t know which of us was most wrong (no one is ever completely right).

I know that a lot of folks cannot help but HOPE this election makes a difference.  Admin’s story of taking his son to his sophomore year of college in 2012 reminds us with casual eloquence during his trips to Walmart and all-you-can-eat-dining experiences that the economic and social ruin described between the lines has only escalated toward this election cycle four years later.  Without saying it explicitly, Admin reminds us the mess that must be cleaned up NOW is much worse than what was waiting in his son’s apartment in 2012.

I did not register to vote when we moved here.  I’d hoped to be able to disappear off the Repugnicant roster of someone who was once a precinct captain among minions.  Unfortunately, the GOP appears able to track anyone anywhere, so I am deluged with letters from the Donald here in the middle of Ozark nowhere.  But, those are easily burned and since we have made the lifestyle choice that allows us to go for days without turning on television or listening to radio, we can pick and choose what we see and learn about the world out there.  My husband is registered as an Independent, but I have no idea if he will actually go vote.  My educated guess as his wife of 24 years is that if I stay unregistered and do not make an effort to vote, he will not leave this farm to go vote either.  But, if someone ponies up a hundred bucks for us to put our “mark” on a ballot, even I will go.  Or logon or whatever we proles are supposed to do these days.

Now, on to the discussion of Rowe’s excellent comments about voting:

After Mike Rowe received a letter asking him to encourage his “huge following” to get out and vote in the presidential election, the wise host of “Somebody’s Gotta Do It” replied with quite the eye-opening civics lesson.

Rowe noted that voting is “an important right that we all share, and one that impacts our society in dramatic fashion. But it’s one thing to respect and acknowledge our collective rights, and quite another thing to affirmatively encourage people I’ve never met to exercise them. And yet, my friends in Hollywood do that very thing, and they’re at it again.”

More from Rowe’s reply:

Every four years, celebrities and movie stars look earnestly into the camera and tell the country to “get out and vote.” They tell us it’s our “most important civic duty,” and they speak as if the very act of casting a ballot is more important than the outcome of the election. This strikes me as somewhat hysterical. Does anyone actually believe that Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen DeGeneres, and Ed Norton would encourage the “masses” to vote, if they believed the “masses” would elect Donald Trump?

Regardless of their political agenda, my celebrity pals are fundamentally mistaken about our “civic duty” to vote. There is simply no such thing. Voting is a right, not a duty, and not a moral obligation. Like all rights, the right to vote comes with some responsibilities, but lets face it — the bar is not set very high. If you believe aliens from another planet walk among us, you are welcome at the polls. If you believe the world is flat, and the moon landing was completely staged, you are invited to cast a ballot. Astrologists, racists, ghost-hunters, sexists, and people who rely upon a Magic 8 Ball to determine their daily wardrobe are all allowed to participate. In fact, and to your point, they’re encouraged.

The undeniable reality is this: our right to vote does not require any understanding of current events, or any awareness of how our government works. So, when a celebrity reminds the country that “everybody’s vote counts,” they are absolutely correct. But when they tell us that “everybody in the country should get out there and vote,” regardless of what they think or believe, I gotta wonder what they’re smoking.

More at…Source: Mike Rowe Delivers Some ‘Undeniable Reality’ About Celebrities Who Urge ‘the Masses’ to Get Out and Vote