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| quote: | | not really. you can be under the legal voting age and realize that your rights are being trampled on. and like voting had any real purpose in communist east germany. unless paul was psychic and knew the date that the Berlin Wall would fall, how was he supposed to know, growing up, that he could voice his opinion without something terrible happening, much less vote? cruel reality doesnt discriminate against age. kudos to paul for working with rock the vote |
But that's just the thing. His rights weren't getting trampled on. So he can't claim personal experience with it. Even if Germany had been unified 5 years before it was, Paul wouldn't have been able to vote until sometime after late 1989, probably 1990 at the earliest, at best.
Anyways, I'm not criticizing Paul for encouraging young Americans to vote (even if they're realistically 'voting' for one of two people who are effectively the same). I'm just saying that he shouldn't really say that he knows what it's like to have his 'vote' repressed. It's like if China were to repeal it's '1 child limit' law weeks before a Chinese teenager hits puberty, and then this teenager says that he knows what it's like to live under procreation oppression. Well, not really, since he couldn't procreate up to that point anyways.
Obviously this allegory doesn't extend perfectly, because voting ability is not a physical property of humans, but the idea remains the same. Paul's saying he knows what it's like to have his voting ability to be repressed, when if fact his voting ability was the same as the ability of most modern people.
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'People cling to their rotten memories, to all their misfortunes, and you can't pry them loose. These things keep them busy. They avenge themselves for the injustice of the present by smearing the future inside them with shit. They're cowards deep down, and just. That's their nature.'
-Louis-Ferdinand Céline
"Journey to the End of the Night"
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