so this isn’t me coming back to tumblr to post regularly, but the new county elections are over, and only 49% of people voted. kokoomus are now the largest party in the pirkanmaa healthcare council, although there’s an overall very slight left/centre majority so it’s not like all hope is lost. honestly, though, i am incredibly disappointed by the turnout, and i need to say this somewhere.
my flatmate, who is in full-time mental health rehabilitation, says that most of the people they know in the same situation didn’t vote because they “don’t care about politics” and “it doesn’t affect them”. i wish i knew how to make it sink in for those people that if they’d been born nearly anywhere else, they would not be considering “kela forms are long” and “i can only get toimeentulotuki for a few months sometimes while things are being processed” and “the housing company is slow to do their free repairs” among their top problems. they would not be in full-time mental health rehabilitation for their moderate-to-severe anxiety from being a lukio dropout. they’d having to learn some real survival skills on a far harsher and faster timeline than the nice päivätoiminta is giving them, or they’d just be fucking dead. genuinely, seriously, i have all the sympathy in the world for someone who is still struggling even with the level of support they have here, your problems are hashtag valid and we need it to be even better - but you have to realise that if kokoomus get a significant majority for a significant length of time, your life will get worse in ways you cannot even imagine from the position of safety you’re in right now.
you do not live in a world where being too unwell to work means you are either homeless yourself or constantly scrambling to help a friend buy a tent because theirs got burned down while they were camping on the street. you do not want to live in that world. people in places where the social security has been cut to ribbons do not get their own flat in some part of town that’s just “not my favourite” and a place to go every day with trained ohjaajas so they don’t get any more insane, they get traumatised by attempting to do exploitative work on the edges of society. yes, much worse and more often than whoever you know in finland that sounds like they fit this description.
there are people in the left party, the greens, and even the SDP who desperately want to do all the hard work for you of fighting for and maintaining basic functioning social security, if you will literally just vote them in to do it. yes, i know party politics sucks and the system needs more dramatic change than voting will ever accomplish, but in finland you literally have a proportional representation system and thousands of candidates to choose from in every single election, and the point is that not voting will make things worse for you personally, more quickly and on a greater scale than you are currently capable of conceptualising.
i do not know how to explain to some of the complacent little bunny rabbits who live full-time on benefits here that kokoomus and persut will, if you let them have a majority for more than a couple of years, take away literally everything that is nice in your life. if doing the (barely longer than a uquiz) vaalikone, letting it tell you for free which candidate matches your views, and walking down to the voting booth is literally too anxiety inducing for you, let me tell you some stories about finding and vetting clients on backpage whose dicks you can suck in their cars so you can eat that week. trust me, it is much more personally difficult than getting some energetic person from the left alliance to fight for your rent support, day activity centres, and youth support workers who know how to fill in forms.
in the uk, they all said “but it’s not within our culture to destroy welfare, it would never happen here, even if they’re right-wing”, too. please, show the tiniest bit of initiative to simply maintain the status quo rather than letting it get so bad it casually kills you and your friends.
to be triple extra clear: i am not talking about the well-connected anarchists etc who are doing more than anyone outside electoral politics and going straight to feeding the homeless themselves, i am talking to the people who literally followed the “lukio dropout to full time mental health rehab” pipeline into total complacence. there’s so many of them and literally none of them seem to understand that in another country, or in a finland that’s had a kokoomus majority for a while, they’d be eating out of the fucking trash and breaking into abandoned bars so they had somewhere to sleep. the people i meet here who wouldn’t even live with another person because “well i have anxiety”, and get to enjoy kela bankrolling that decision to live alone in a nice warm personal flat - literally what would you do if all that went away, and you had to find a group of people, all by yourself, to break into a cold abandoned building with so you had a room to sleep all 20 of you in? does that genuinely sound easier than simply keeping hold of the status quo you rely on?
wake the fuck up! stop reading about american politics online! be aware of what the sote-uudistus means for your own fucking paikkakunta, and next time, go and exert what meager influence you can on the people directly arranging your social and health care!
Explain to them that if they don’t pay attention they could wind up living like an American.
see, the thing is, i wasn’t even talking about “living like an american”. the only time the USA was alluded to at all here was when i bitched about people following a bunch of US political causes via their social media feeds while remaining completely unaware of what is physically happening around them. all the stuff i alluded to happened to me in the UK, where they still have some vestiges of social security, still have free-to-very-cheap healthcare, etc. you do not actually have to remove that much before everything crumbles around everyone but the most lucky and functional.
