V: Voting & Voice

We need to be honest about what is happening. A lot of support for Republican politics comes down to one thing: the protection of wealth. That has been one of the clearest appeals for years. Lower taxes for the affluent. Lower taxes for corporations. Policies that make it easier to preserve and pass on assets. That is not a guess. Analyses of the 2017 tax law found that high-income households and large corporations benefited the most.

And that is exactly why this conversation needs more depth. Wanting to protect what you built is human. Wanting stability for your family is human. But there has to be a moral line somewhere. There has to be a point where we ask whether protecting money is really important enough to keep backing a political order that keeps asking everyone else to live with the consequences. Less protection. Less dignity. Less access. Less care. Less power. At some point, we have to say plainly that wealth is not a high enough value to keep sacrificing humanity to it.

That is also why I keep coming back to voting. People talk about voting with so much exhaustion now that they forget why it became a fight in the first place. Voting became a fight because access to power in this country was never meant to be shared freely. Black Americans were forced to move through poll taxes, literacy tests, bureaucratic obstruction, intimidation, economic retaliation, and violence just to exercise a right that should have already been theirs. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was necessary because those barriers were real and deeply entrenched.

So when people become disillusioned and start saying voting does not matter, I understand the feeling, but I also think we need to recognize how useful that feeling is to the wrong people. In the Senate, legislation can be stalled or blocked through procedure, including cloture rules that generally require 60 votes to end debate on legislation. That means gridlock is often structural, not simply proof that nothing matters.

And once people are pushed far enough into cynicism, they begin to detach from the process altogether. That detachment has consequences. Since the 2020 election, at least 30 states have enacted 110 restrictive voting laws, according to the Brennan Center.

What people should really sit with is that the fight for voting was never just about casting a

ballot. It was about whether ordinary people, especially Black people, would be allowed to shape the country at all. That is why indifference around voting is so dangerous. And that is also why we need to ask a harder question about the value system underneath so much of our politics: how many times are people going to keep defending it simply because it protects wealth better. How many times are we going to treat money as so sacred that it justifies everyone else carrying the cost. Because that is what this becomes after a while. A decision to treat accumulation as more worthy of protection than human beings. A decision to choose insulation for the comfortable over dignity for the public. And once people lose faith in voting, they can begin to treat the erosion of access like it is normal, even though there is nothing normal about a country repeatedly finding new ways to make democratic participation more difficult. History already showed us what happens when people in power are allowed to decide whose voice counts and whose does not. That is not a small moral failure. It is one of the clearest ones.

And beyond all of that, there is something even more personal that gets overlooked: the

responsibility of having a voice at all.

Because having a voice is not just about speaking. It is about understanding what is worth

saying. It is about sitting with your thoughts long enough to know where they came from, what shaped them, and who they might impact. Too many people treat their voice like a reflex instead of a tool. Words come out quickly, opinions form instantly, and very little of it is rooted in reflection, in history, or in any real sense of accountability.

But a voice without intention is easily guided. Easily influenced. Easily turned into noise.

And noise does not challenge anything. Noise does not shift power. Noise does not honor the people who were denied the right to speak at all.

So there has to be a pause. A willingness to sit with what you think, what you feel, and what you value before you offer it to the world. There has to be a deeper curiosity about where your perspective fits within a larger history. Not just your own life, but your family, your community, and the generations that came before you. The people who had voices and the people who were stripped of theirs.

Because once you understand that, your voice changes. It becomes more precise. More

intentional. More grounded in something real.

And I think that is part of what is being lost right now. We are moving so fast, reacting so

quickly, speaking so often, that we are no longer processing what it actually means to be human. What it means to participate in a society. What it means to hold a voice that could either reinforce the system or challenge it.

We are in a rush, but it is a rush without direction. A constant movement that rarely leads to

review. And in that kind of environment, it becomes easier to stay distracted, easier to stay

disconnected, and easier to remain inside systems that were never designed for collective growth.

Because a thoughtful voice is harder to control.

A voice that understands history is harder to mislead.

A voice that has taken time to know itself is harder to silence.

And maybe that is part of the reason so many people are encouraged, directly or indirectly, to stay reactive instead of reflective. Because once people begin to truly process what they are part of, what they are contributing to, and what they are capable of changing, the system itself starts to lose its grip.

So this is not just about voting. It is not just about politics.

It is about whether people are willing to slow down enough to recognize the weight of their own voice.