I will excuse a lot of those people here in the US.
In my own case, I am physically disabled at the moment watching the people taking care of me and providing me transportation be horribly overworked to the point where it is painful to watch. What should I be doing with my time? Should I judge my caretakers for not making some sort of time? Is it inexcusable that I am not pressuring them to do something?
I’d like to know actually what I can do, because I’m not happy with where things are. You suggest it’s a moral failure but I literally don’t know what action I can take that would not be judged a moral failure.
Maybe my situation is unique in some ways, but it’s not that unique in the idea that for a lot of people, finding more time could cost the livlihoods of both them and their dependents. Maybe the people you meet in your day-to-day life can easily find time to organize, etc at no significant cost, but the majority of the remaining population are oppressed themselves, just in a less severe way. Every family is isolated, and when you are isolated with a precarious livlihood, setting aside time for something comes at a cost, so is a serious choice. The obvious answer is to try to become less isolated, but that requires setting aside time without guaranteed payoff. It’s easy to judge people for not doing that when there’s no potential cost to your own dependents.
Most people here are living day-to-day trying to cling to what little joys they have. You can come up with laundry lists of ways they are wasting their time and money, but those wastes are hard to give up for someone living day-to-day. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but decrying the inaction from the majority of our population is shifting blame to the powerless.
Okay, I thought we were discussing something wholly different. I worked in Dearborn and we all had friends who lost relatives as our country refused to stop sending arms. One of my best students completely fell off after losing a lot of her extended family and it was painful to watch.
But you don’t need to have personal experience with someone affected to be outraged. It’s a line some people are unwilling to cross. I am one of them. Downplaying that as they “would rather not vote if there isn’t a perfect candidate on the ballot” is either wholly disingenuous or a complete absence of empathy. A candidate I have “agreed with the majority of items” but disagreed on the morality of supplying weapons used to commit a genocide is one I will not vote for.
If the president is aware that he is sending weapons killing innocents and still signs off to send more, and one of those bombs kills someone I love, would you blame me for not voting for him? If not, why would you blame someone who empathizes with me for making the same decision?
The democrats did not have to support this, and would have won the election if not for this complete moral bankruptcy. Blaming nonvoters is shifting blame from the powerful to the powerless.