I started my local Nextdoor group after a pair of pajamas arrived at my house. I didn’t order them. Nobody I knew sent them. So I started the group to find out who owned the pajamas.
Also, because Nextdoor is hugely useful, especially in a bedroom community, like the one I live in, where you don’t know your neighbors.
Nextdoor, if you don’t know it, is a social media group devoted to neighborhood issues. People post about missing pets, yard sales, who knows a good plumber? What was that noise on Maple Street?
It is not meant for political discussions. The site discourages them. I discourage them.
Last spring a Libertarian posted an inflammatory message about the police. He posted it six times. He posted it twice in the section that is supposed to be for things for sale. That is overkill.
I didn’t like it. The site didn’t like it. The site told him so, and he left.
I have posted political messages, inane political messages. In February, I told everyone how very easy it is to register to vote online. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is staffed by morons, but, so far they haven’t found their way onto the voter registration site, so you can do it fairly easily.
Nextdoor objected to my saying the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is staffed by morons, even though it is. I understood, and tamed my posting.
Before election day, I put up a post asking people to vote, because we are lucky to live in a democracy, and not everyone has the right to vote, and you’ve read it all before. It was inane. It was meant to be inane. I just wanted people to vote. (I wanted them to vote for Democrats, but I kept that to myself. ) The responses were as inane as I hoped for.
After election day, I added another inane post, thanking everyone who voted, because we live in a democracy, and voting is a precious right, and you’ve read all that before too.
I expected a few likes. (You can like things on Nextdoor.) and maybe an inane comment or two. Instead some guy wrote about dead people voting. It was something he’d seen someplace, on some right wing web site, I wouldn’t go near, and he believed it.
Another woman posted that she would never vote again, because there was so much voter fraud.
Which is what the Republicans want.
They don’t like it when we vote.
Because sometimes we vote our own interests. We vote for better funding for schools. We vote to raise the minimum wage. We vote for higher taxes for the wealthy. (The wealthy really hate that one.)
So, the Republicans do all kinds of things to keep us from voting. They make it hard to register. They pass voter I.D. laws, and they perpetuate the myth that voter fraud is a real problem.
Apparently, this year, a few people died after sending their absentee ballots, so yes, some dead people voted. Of course they weren’t dead when they voted. So, I wouldn’t call it voter fraud, just bad luck.
I worked at a polling place for a while. Our chief problem there, was that the machines didn’t always work. There was a phone number we could call when that happened, but the line was always busy.
We always had people who came early, or came late, and were angry when we wouldn’t let them vote.
We usually had to chase some man out of the booth and explain to him that he wasn’t allowed to tell his wife how to vote.
Voter fraud was never a concern.
But, if the Republicans can convince people that their vote doesn’t matter, that the whole process is corrupt they gain a bigger victory than Mitch McConnell’s, because people won’t vote.
Yes, one or two of them may decide to bomb a church or shoot up a synagogue, but that’s yokels killing yokels, the Republican establishment really doesn’t mind.
What they mind is when yokels vote.
Remember that this May, my fellow yokels, and again in November, and vote! vote! vote! vote! Nothing worries the Republicans quite so much as Americans going to the polls.