Horrible PSA: It's Okay to Bully Kids If Their Parents Didn't Vote?
Woah, your dad didn't vote? Is he some kind of loser nihilist?
Schoolyard bullying: it's never okay. Unless, of course, the victim is the offspring of a non-voter. Then the kid probably deserves it—or should at least blame his dad for not caring enough about politics.
That's the confusing message behind a new get-out-the-vote video produced by Civic Innovation Works, a mysterious organization without much of an online presence. The video recently appeared on my News Feed: here it is.
The best part is the bully shouting, "your dad sounds like a total nihilist," as if that's some kind of put down. In reality, any politically-informed human being who isn't flirting with nihilism as a result of the 2016 campaign should have his head checked.
Of course, not voting is a perfectly responsible thing to do, for reasons outlined by Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward: your vote has virtually no chance of influencing the outcome of a presidential election (even if you live in Florida and are using a time machine to travel back to the year 2000), the time it takes to vote is almost always better spent doing something else (if you value doing something else more than voting), and casting an ill-informed vote is almost certainly worse than not voting at all.
What makes this video so disturbing—and funny, if we're being honest—is all the other PSAs about how terrible bullying is for kids. There's something so self-righteous about the act of voting that it causes people to take leave of their senses.
Related: Who Will Get Our Votes? Reason's 2016 Presidential Poll
