I appreciate the fact that more and more people are voting in the Iraqi elections. I look on it as a good sign.
Terrorism, for the most part, happens because people feel they don't have any say in the way things are. If your government won't let you have any say in it—if you're deprived of your freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly—then violence appears to be the only way you can make a statement. The reason free countries have so much less terrorism is because, by and large, our citizens believe they do have a say.
There are some exceptions, naturally. There are those people who really have been deprived of a say in the way things run—the Indians, the African Americans, the inner-city poor—and there are the people who only think they've been deprived, like the militia members, the hippies, and the Klan. The one thing these groups have in common is that when they become desperate, they get violent. But the one thing that diffuses the violence is when someone finally takes them seriously and talks to them—which is, after all, what they really wanted in the first place.
So in the case of Iraq, I'm quite sure that the more people vote, and the more they recognize that their votes actually stand for something, the less violence and insurgency there will be in that country, and the less need they will have for our troops. Thank God.
In the meanwhile, the United States is a country where less and less people vote all the time. I have to admit, I've become another one of them. I didn't vote in the last two elections.
This is not because I don't care—I did actually care about the propositions and the local elections, even though I really didn't care so much about the national races. Picking between Bush and Kerry was a lot like deciding which angry deviant you'd like as your cellmate—the felon who quotes the bible all the time but still shanks people in the shower, or the felon who rants and raves all the time but never does anything. Both of them claim they got your back, but you'd better start Vaseline-ing your rectum all the same. The fact that the two main parties keep giving us a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee every four years isn't why I didn't vote; it's because I haven't registered in this county, and haven't bothered to have my absentee ballot from Solano County sent here.
I think most of the reason Americans don't vote is that we're okay with things the way they are. We have a (mostly) stable and non-corrupt system; there are no huge and pressing needs to get us out to the polls. If there were, we'd vote. But we don't. So we must be doing all right. Prosperity provokes apathy—something any evangelist or Roman emperor could tell you.
I'm hopeful for the Iraqis—hopeful they don't take on our bad habits. Freedom has its penalties.