VOTING

  
[November 2004]
ELLEN: I don't know, Judy. I don't know. I woke up in that horrible hotel room in Ohio on Wednesday morning and I couldn't - I couldn't turn on the TV. I couldn't bear to hear them say that he had won again. I felt so sick...I don't think I've ever felt people so crushed politically. So many people worked so fucking hard. How did it happen? I mean when you went to the polls, how many people were in line?
JUDY: I didn't vote.
ELLEN: What?
JUDY: I don't vote.
ELLEN: I don't -- I can't -- How could you not vote in this election? How could you -- help George Bush to get re-elected.
JUDY: I didn't do that.
ELLEN: You didn't vote. I don't understand. I don't know how you, especially -- you're out there seeing first hand the impact he's having in the world, how could you not have cast a vote against him.
JUDY: I don't vote.
ELLEN: Never?
JUDY: No.
ELLEN: Okay. You have to say more
JUDY: I -- I don't want to participate in a system I don't believe in....
ELLEN: You don't believe in American Democracy.
JUDY: No.
ELLEN: That's crazy.
JUDY: Why?
ELLEN: What system is better?
JUDY: I don't know. But I do know that voting is a false exercise. You know this. You're the one who talks about how the system is skewed so that the votes in rich, white Republican districts are counted at much higher levels.
ELLEN: If more people voted they could change that.
JUDY: How? Gore did get more votes than Bush.
ELLEN: I know but --
JUDY: The Supreme Court handed Bush the election.
ELLEN: Yes, exactly. This right wing mob has abdicated from the system. That's why we have to do everything we can to get them out before they dismantle the whole apparatus.
JUDY: The apparatus is working as it's meant to work, to facilitate the self interests of wealthy men in power.
ELLEN: But that's not what it's meant to do.
JUDY: Ellen, for the first 20 something years of this country only white male property owners could vote. That's what this country was set up to do. We can put whatever band-aids on that we want but that's the set up.
ELLEN: Okay, yes. The founders reflected the world at the time. But they set up systems that could grow and become more inclusive.
JUDY: I think you have a totally romanticized view of their intentions and of any inclusion. My grandmother grew up in a world where she couldn't vote. The voting rights act wasn’t passed until 1965. When I was in junior high school black people still couldn’t vote.
ELLEN: Okay. Yes. Maybe I'm assigning retroactive intentionality. That's probably right. That's what we do, right? We look back at things that happened randomly and we assign intentionality to them. But that's what I'm saying. The genius of the system is that it was set up to allow for the dynamic accretion of those random events which have made the system more inclusive.
JUDY: Whatever inclusion you see has happened in spite of the system not because of it.

-- Lisa Kron, In the Wake


               Marin Ireland as Ellen and Deidre O'Connell as Judy in In the Wake