How Do You Help People Who Vote Against Their Own Best Interests?
I find myself asking this question more and more often. There is so much at stake in our modern world as it visibly declines, yet fewer and fewer people are able to make the good decisions required to protect themselves.
I suppose good judgement and well informed citizens were always outnumbered by the reckless and uninformed, but in the past, we all knew less and could easily plead ignorance.
There’s a reason our parents let us ride bikes without a helmet or stand in the back of the pickup as they barreled down an old dirt road leading to town.
You simply can’t know what you don’t know.
For some reason or other, even though race car drivers wore protective clothing, seat belts, and helmets, it never dawned on parents back in the day that an infant’s head was just as vulnerable to getting smashed against the dashboard as a celebrity’s noggin.
We simply hadn’t put two and two together yet.
My parents literally had no advice for me growing up. None! I know people who wax nostalgic about their childhoods are kind of offended when I say this, but it was true. My parents just turned me lose and went on about their business. I don’t even remember having the TALK about sex or birth control.
Nada!
The gold standard of parenting back in the day was determined by whether your parents fed you, clothed you, and put a roof over your head. The rest was up to you to figure out and when you turned eighteen, you were expected to get out there and start fending for yourself.
Which we did. I did for sure.
I managed through a lot of hard knocks to figure things out for myself. Being wired to avoid risky behaviors, I didn’t need to repeat the same harrowing experiences in order to finally figure things out. Once was usually enough for me. And, if I could avoid trouble by using my keen ability of observation, in other words, learn from other people’s mistakes, well, all the better.
Still, it’s discouraging to have made it this far, 2022, in the age of information and technological wonders only to find out that Americans have remained deeply ignorant.
Some of it is no doubt due to lack of opportunity, but much of it is a legacy of unfounded pride and stubborn cultural expectations that keep generation after generation of families from progressing.
Their lack of progress unfortunately affects the whole of America.
They vote against their own best interests which gets in the way of me getting to experience the progress that is long overdue. It’s one thing to be a woman and choose to join a religious cult that bans personal autonomy for females, but it’s another thing altogether when that choice becomes a political movement to force me to give up my right to freedom of choice. It’s one thing to end up in a dead end job with no health insurance and starvation wages, but it’s another thing entirely if the starving person votes for the party that wants to deny universal health care to me and my family.
Suddenly, being ignorant isn’t that cute any more. It’s dangerous.
Sometimes, people who are willing to work hard for social progress by organizing protests or banning businesses do so without realizing that the very people they are fighting for will turn around and vote for the party that keeps them hog tied and down and out.
Like when you live in a red state where Walmart workers vote republican even though it’s the democrats who want to raise the minimum wage and give them health care.
Sure some of the workers are voting for social justice but in a state that has only voted 16.67% of the time for a Democratic president since 1900, you gotta figure that most are not.
Yeah, that’s my state. Hoosier land, don’t ya know.
Or when you have teachers who refuse to be members of the teacher’s union and then turn around and vote for the party that’s pro charter schools and drooling to end the teacher’s state pension plan.
For the life of me, I do not understand how the human brain works and why we behave the way we do.
Historically, this has happened over and over again. leaving me to wonder why I bother to refuse to shop at Walmart and pay higher prices for groceries when no one who works there would lift a finger to help me.
It sounds childish I know, but this kind of strange behavior isn’t uncommon.
When suffraggettes in England were being thrown into prisons and reviled by their neighbors because they wanted women who worked in the textile mills to be paid fairly, the very women who needed the money, often refused to participate.
Not all that long ago, a group of Amazon workers were making a valiant attempt to form a union because of poor working conditions but were defeated by their own coworkers.
I’m not convinced, looking back on history, that it’s possible to help people. We have a tendency to be our own worst enemies. To become a martyr for a cause may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of in my seventy-one years of being alive. Martyrs have long been sacrificed because no one had their backs.
So, what works?
In my humble opinion, organic change seems to work the best. You get a new bridge when the old one falls in and people drown. You get a new place to work when the old place folds and you’re forced to move to a new location. You get a new culture when the key players of the old culture have fallen behind so badly that someone must step forward to pick up the pieces.
So, women now work when our sisters in the past couldn’t because men can no longer make enough to support a family. People in dead end jobs were finally forced to better themselves when the factory shut down.
There’s inevitable casualties of social warfare, even the organic kind.
Sadly, somebody always ends up on the bottom of the pecking order. But eventually, what took so long to change has finally morphed into a different version of America. Sometimes better and sometimes worse, but always different. Because change is inevitable
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use our big brains to plan changes that would be so amazing as to mark the date that it took place as a moment of monumental evolution?
Maybe some day. But not yet. Too many people still don’t get it. Maybe we’re too limited by our big brains, however. The very brains that we say separate us from the animal kingdom, giving us dominion over everything. Our brains may very well be our greatest asset, but they sabotage us without mercy as well.
If our faulty brains were cars, there would’ve been a massive recall long ago.
This leaves me scratching my head in disbelief and disappointment as I’m reminded that it’s almost impossible to help people even if you wanted to do so.
Teresa Roberts is a retired educator, author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
