I should begin with a few disclaimers:
- I've got a bit of the 'bleeding-heart' thing going on.
- I'm a young-un, at least (I assume) by DailyKos standards. In my mid-twenties, I've seen just enough of the world to know I don't know everything.
That said, these election results have done nothing to limit my motivation, and here's why ...
I did a couple years of AmeriCorps, so I could understand your assuming I have a bias when I report that it is a worthwhile organization, and I wasn't actually in Obama's Hitler Youth (my first year was under Bush II anyways).
My first year of service, straight out of college, was in Baltimore, MD. I worked with a large housing non-profit there. I'm not from that area, so for me this was a crash course in urban poverty.
Poverty is not something that Baltimore has a shortage of. Even before the recession, many neighborhoods had absurdly high unemployment rates. Crime and drugs are rampant ... at one point, I saw an article estimating that 1 in 17 Baltimore residents is addicted to heroin.
There were stabbings and beat-downs in the neighborhoods we worked in during the day, while we were around. Worse happened at night. Gentrification was kicking lifelong residents out of their homes to make way for wealthier DC commuters - Pigtown is a prime example of that.
I knew one guy whose dad, a blind man, was an outspoken opponent of gangs in his neighborhood. They'd had drive-by shootings into their home.
The dozen or so houses we could build in a year seemed like pitifully small potatoes next to the problems that city faced. And they were.
But we built them anyways.
My next year was in rural Louisiana, repairing low-income homes from hurricane damage as well as normal wear-and-tear. Along with leading volunteer groups, I helped visit homeowners and go through applications.
We received hundreds of applications, but were lucky if we could help twenty or so homeowners in a year. You'd see homes with unbelievable amounts of mold, homes with no running water, collapsing roofs, even one house that was split in two, years after the hurricane.
The work we did was spitting into the ocean, but damned if we didn't spit.
I'm not writing this to toot my own horn, far from it - I'm sure many of you have done far more than I have. In fact, I've done almost exactly nothing; I've only been an incredibly small part of something worthwhile.
And maybe that's what it comes down to - the difference between almost exactly nothing, and nothing.
In the end, you can choose to not vote or care, saying one vote is only 0.00000065% of the total (or whatever that number is), and you aren't changing that many people's minds with your phonebanking/canvassing/whatever anyways.
Or you can throw your efforts, a small part of the total, into something worthwhile.
I know what I'm choosing.