Please Vote!

As a Brit, I have no real right to be invested in American politics, but we all know that the result of the US election will affect the state of the rest of the world for the immediate future and goodness knows how long after.

I went out and voted against Brexit. I fell asleep confident that my countrymen would make the right decision, and that we would remain in the EU, because we were a country that valued tolerance and freedom. Because at our hearts we were good people who would not be swayed by inflammatory rhetoric that blamed our problems on people worse off than ourselves.

When I woke, it was to find out that all the people who believed as I did had also assumed that of course we would remain, so they had not bothered to vote at all. Or they had made a ‘protest’ vote, thinking their vote would not matter enough to undermine the outcome they wanted.

As a result, we are now stuck in a country soon to be isolated from the rest of the world, where rising levels of racism are probably only the ugly tip of the iceberg of anti-women, anti-queer, anti-poor, anti-[insert convenient minority] prejudice that we thought was beaten, but will now have to be fought all over again.

You still have the chance not to let that happen to you. Please go out and vote! Don’t waste your vote on a protest or a third party. If you care about rights for LGBTQ people, for women, for people of colour, for poor and disabled people, don’t stay at home today. Please vote. Not only for your future, but also for the rest of the world.