Not voting as an act of conscience

I've never built my own personal philosophy around platitudes, first off they're often nuggets of false wisdom and there's also that faint whiff of conformity about them, the best distillation that groupthink has to offer but you can have your VSOP. For instance you often hear it said that it's your patriotic duty to vote and as an extension of this if you don't vote you have no right to complain. I disagree in this sense, let's say you sincerely feel both candidates would do damage to the country, you're not voting for the lesser of two evils anymore, you've conscientiously thought it through, turned it over, stretched it inside out and come to the same conclusion. In such a limited case, and I'm not talking here about young'ens who don't vote 'cause they're lazy, in this restricted scenario I hold that not voting can be an act of conscience. It's kind of like a person who never marries or ain't marrying anytime soon, sure he/she can do like everyone else and vet candidates they can live comfortably with, someone strongly likeable but the purist would insist you really should be in love with someone before you marry them and if he ain't feeling that amorous about anyone of late than not marrying can be a personal act of conscience albeit a painful one at times, better to be lonely for a bit than not be pure at heart. Stands to reason you should be "in love" with a candidate first before you pull the lever for him or her, of course the Obama-ites are enraptured but what about our side? Sean is only getting jiggy with it because he's such a party hound. I'm turning Conventional Wisdom on its head here, that's the Z-man thing, an outside the box kind of deal and the possibility is always there that I won't vote this time around. It's that remote option for most of us because we don't like to be held in contempt but I've always been the type to hold to an opinion even if 9 others disagree with me. As Benjamin Disraeli once said "the majority is usually wrong."