helloooooooooooo

about chick-fil-a

I’ve thought about posting this several places for awhile.  I’ve finally decided to just go with tumblr!  Congratulations, if you’re here; you’re in the chosen place.

The short gist of this essay is: You may have stopped boycotting Chick-fil-A because they stopped supporting anti-gay groups.  But they actually still support them!  I’ll explain:

So if you know me you probably know that last July/August/September I led a campaign on Davidson’s campus to get our Union Board to stop serving Chick-fil-A at their sponsored events.  Spoiler alert!  … it worked!  We stopped serving Chick-fil-A AND lots of people stopped eating there, because they didn’t want their money going toward anti-gay advocacy groups.

FASTFORWARD A WEEK OR SO:

Chick-fil-A announces they are not funding these groups any longer!!!

J/K!

A week after the Union Board made this announcement, we happened to hear a big announcement, not from Chick-fil-A, but from an alderman in Chicago.. the same one that had previously (and controversially) declared he would keep Chick-fil-A from settling in his area because of Dan Cathy’s remarks on gay marriage.  This time, he was backing down, because, according to him, Chick-fil-A had stopped supporting these groups.  Many media outlets, like the Huffington Post (who had earlier hyped Davidson’s story!), were quick to spread the word.

This was great news for a lot of people!  Included are several of my friends who, after hearing this great news, immediately began frequenting Chick-fil-A once again.  ”I am so excited that we can go to Chick-fil-A again!” one friend wrote on another’s Facebook wall.  I am paraphrasing.  But this is almost completely what happened.

Not long after this announcement, it was shown to be false.  Chick-fil-A itself came out to refute the rumors (right here); after all, it was in its own business interests to do so.  If Chick-fil-A were to stop supporting anti-gay groups, and the world were to find out, they would lose the new, magnified, Mike Huckabee-cultivated consumer base that has ironically driven up chicken sales since the initial Chick-fil-A backlash began.

Yet the media, for whatever reason, didn’t catch on quite so loudly to this update.  And so, now, we have a lot of people in the world, who had previously stopped buying Chick-fil-A out of outrage over their business practices (or for the less rational, over their owner’s public remarks), again frequenting Chick-fil-A because the restaurant has “changed.”

So why does this bother me?  I mean, there are obvious reasons.  I don’t want the progress of successful campaigns like my own being nullified.  But more importantly, I want people to be making informed decisions.  I originally campaigned at my school and pushed for votes and referendums because I wanted my student body to decide what it wanted based on facts about a company’s business practices.  And unfortunately, fact-based knowledge has been offset by media reporting.  So if, given everything I’ve said in this post, you still want to buy and eat Chick-fil-A, that’s fine.  I fully respect your right to give no shits and I also respect your right to sign a petition and then change your mind about it later.

But try to make sure you aren’t basing your decisions on lies.  You now have one less excuse to do that.

On Voting [for president]

I’m going to vote.  I think.  I don’t know who (or what) I’m voting for or even that I definitely will show up to do that, but right now voting is the plan.  However, let’s say I’m not going to vote.  I’ve been making that threat for awhile now, mostly in response when my friends ask me “who [I’m] voting for” or “have [I] voted yet” or something like that.  And typically, my friends stare at me with a sense of helplessness which seems to be more appropriate for learning you have terminal cancer.  ”Oh no!”, they say.  ”Why??” … Well, I guess I owe them some sort of explanation . . since they’re my friends.  Dear friends: there are much more important things to think about.

The stigma attached to not voting in this country is next to insurmountable.  Even though nearly half of eligible Americans don’t do it, admitting so is kind of like social suicide if your preferred social group is people who care about things.  Even after I elaborate, when defending myself in front of electoral politics-obsessed comrades, that I have entirely lost faith in the political system and that I prefer not choosing the “lesser of two evils” because that actually is voting for evil, I get all sorts of questions.  ”Why don’t you vote for a third party candidate?”, they ask.  ”Maybe you could write someone in?” . . My favorite was absolutely when someone, begging me not to throw my vote away, urged me to write my own name down instead, as if I could avoiding throwing away my vote by picking someone zero other people in the U.S. will be voting for.  ”What kind of statement are you trying to make by not voting?”, he asked me.

That’s an excellent, question, one which should be turned on its head.  What kind of “statement” am I trying to make by voting?  Honestly.  Such an absurd starting question deserves to be asked in reverse, when even in a situation where I have determined I have no reason or sway to vote, not doing so is a missed and prime opportunity for political expression.  Voting is the opposite of political expression.  It is a void substitute for political expression, one which reduces voices to a manageable, numerical, and binary system of picking out the next national mascot without causing too much trouble.

As a mechanism, voting is beautiful and, at times, even effective in producing substantive change.  In fact, I have been recently discussing the idea of a “no vote”, a subversive vote which is yet in the system, taking advantage of voting’s establishment to tally absolute dissension within our machine’s preferred, orderly scheme.  Such a vote (already employed in Russia, I hear) would be a nice signal that democracy might not be entirely dead.  I personally think it’s indicative of who runs our “democracy” that we do not have this vote already.

Regardless, no “no vote” is going to materialize anytime soon, and returning to my previous point, I want to stress that voting—or not—will make no such far-reaching “statement” as my well-meaning friend implied.  If either makes any resounding impact upon at least my local space, it will be the decision not to vote, which is disruptive (if vocalized) and inherently thought-provoking in a way making the same decision 100 million other Americans are making is not. When my minuscule act of standing out of line will not mean anything to the election, the candidates, or the large media outlets who cover them, it may mean something to those who live with me.

Much more central to a discussion of positive change in our country should be political participation which can take place outside the voting booth.   While we spend countless hours (and countable campaign dollars, which recently passed two billion) devoted to an election which means very little at all, our political system is spiraling in a direction we certainly should not and hopefully do not want—and it will continue to do so in the coming year, regardless of electoral result, so long as we choose to do nothing.  As a quite small host of falsely polarizing issues continues to dominate the debate sphere, money continues to corrupt policy coming from all ends of the spectrum, just foreign policy is nowhere to be found, we willfully trash our environment on a systemic level, and reason informs nothing.  A drive of political action outside the institutional—in which people take to streets, not taking “no” or “pick one of these” as an answer—could challenge the status quo.  But we’re not doing that.

Come the election, it really matters little who is picked.  A nice analysis done by the Political Compass people shows a startling similarity between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama—one which says less about these politicians’ ideals and more about who they are.  Each may seem horrifying and terrific in his own way, yet both have made it as far as they have by mastering the art of pandering to those closest to them.  There may be strategic and valid reasons for picking a candidate.  I already indicated I will probably vote for something, and I have reasons.  But what will truly make or break not the election, but the future of our country, is how we choose to challenge—or ignore—our shared plight.  Sooner or later, our actions will catch up with us.  So please, vote how you will … and then participate in your democracy.