The woman who actually lives in the house had just moved to Oklahoma City from Maryland with her family about two weeks earlier.
“I keep asking them, ‘who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening,’” she said. “And they said, ‘we have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”
She said they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even put on clothes.
“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” she said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”
Marisa said the names on the search warrant were not hers or anyone in her family.
“We just moved here from Maryland,” she said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”
She said the agents didn’t care.
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she said. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
Marisa said the agents tore apart every square inch of the house and what few belongings they had, seizing their phones, laptops and their life savings in cash as “evidence.”
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” she said. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
Before they left, Marisa said one of the agents made a comment.
“One of them said, ‘I know it was a little rough this morning,’” she said. “It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was a little rough? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow.”
Now, Marisa said they have, quite literally, nothing.
“I said, ‘when are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months,” she said.
Marisa said she is left with nothing but questions.
Confidently incorrect.
Like I said, every single local election, from city BOE and councils, to county boards to state officials count.
The local elections are who draw the districts are who disenfranchise.
The county courts, the district courts who are elected are who rule in favor of gerrymandering.
So if you skip a vote, if you are too busy, too tired, too hungover, that’s it. It’s on you.
If you can’t grasp that, it’s on you.
Voting doesn’t matter when both candidates are right-wing.
That’s literally why we’re here.
And it’s the local smaller elections that form the basis of the “parties” that put those candidates up.
The DNC and RNC, all those people sent from the states to nominate who the Democrat or Republican runner is, they’re all locals.
If people stepped up and replaced those ignorant twats, we’d get something different.
But instead, we whine that it doesn’t matter and don’t do anything and wonder why it doesn’t change.
Not be that guy, but the person you’re replying to isn’t exactly wrong in saying “every vote counts is wrong” in some cases.
Being pedantically literal, yes, every vote is counted.
The reality of First Past The Post voting and the Electoral College is that the only votes that “count” insofar that they actually affect the outcome of an election are votes for the winning party. Now add on to that the common understanding that both major parties only care about what their corporate donors have to say, and that individual voter participation isn’t likely to influence anything other than the party campaign strategy for the next election.
That means that if enough people vote as a collective to flip which party wins, then and only then does their vote count for anything meaningful. People should vote anyways, but it’s not hard to see why someone might be just a little bit disenfranchised when their participation in the democratic process seems to result in nothing but wasted time because they live next to a bunch of a conservative hicks.
You are absolutely right about smaller state and local elections, though. Those are where each vote actually has a chance to be meaningful.
I am not american, and if I was one of approximately 5.1 million (that is about 1 out of 44 or so people) who have lost the ability to vote, no I don’t have a say in any level of us politics.
You are as a nation well past the “lesser evil” party saving you. You are full on into the sort of terrible collapse shown in the subject of the article you are promoting. As a side note, with how the silly two teams system of yours works, the dems if back in power will forever be a little worse then before trump.
