Hello Kind and Curious Leader,
I vote at Trinity Presbyterian Church, in the community room, where the volunteers arrive before the doors open to set up the tables and the machines and the little laminated signs, so that by the time I walk in it all looks like it has always been there. I have stood in that room more times than I can count. It never feels dramatic. That is the part most people miss.
Democracy does not announce itself. It looks like an ordinary weekday morning, a folding table, a friendly face that has probably checked ten thousand IDs, a short walk to a machine that takes about four minutes to change nothing and everything at once. My proudest moment, every single time, is the one that should probably embarrass a man who used to run companies.
Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta
Getting my "I voted" sticker, the one shaped like a Georgia peach, and wearing it out the door like I earned something. I did.
Three weeks ago I wrote about what we believe: the isms we throw at each other, the honest fear underneath each one, and the discipline of understanding an argument before you try to win it. Last week I wrote about the tent, and what it costs a leader to hold one open for people who disagree. Both of those pieces were about the room.
This one is about the chair. Naming what you believe is the first move, and the easy one. Holding the room open is the leader's move. The move that belongs to every one of us, leader or not, has a plainer name, and the name is participation.
A participative democracy gets measured by whether people show up to decide at all, never by who wins. That is the whole idea hiding inside the word. A democracy you join, rather than one you watch. When enough people stop joining, the building is still there and the flags still hang, but the thing that made it a democracy has quietly left the room. Power stops being questioned. It just gets kept.
Earlier this year I wrote about leaving a board seat at Indiana University, and about what I learned watching how institutions actually stay honest. They stay honest exactly as long as the people they answer to keep using their vote and their voice, and not one day longer. An alumni ballot and a citizen ballot are the same muscle. Neither one survives being left unused.
I argued in the isms piece that the real danger in any system is power that cannot be questioned, whichever direction it leans. The quiet, unglamorous truth about voting is that it is how a free people questions power on a schedule. No revolution required. No permission needed. A line, a table, a machine, and a date on the calendar. That is the mechanism, and it is more radical than it looks sitting in a folding chair.
I made the case last week that opting out hands your share of every decision to whoever stays in the room, so I will only add the ballot to that list. The one you skip still gets cast, by someone else, without your input.
I understand why people step back, so let me say the honest reasons out loud instead of pretending they do not exist. It feels like one vote vanishes into millions. It feels like the noise and the outcome were both settled without you. It feels exhausting to keep caring about a system that does not always seem to care back. Those feelings are real, and every one of them leaves the same thing out: each is an argument for someone else deciding your future, and none of them changes the fact that the seat is still yours until you give it away.
Let me be plain about where I stand, and just as plain about where I will not push you. I vote. I consider it a duty, not a mood. I also have no interest in telling you how to fill in your ballot, because a participative democracy needs the person who reaches a different conclusion than mine in the booth just as much as it needs me. The room does not work if only one kind of person shows up. That is the design.
The stakes are close to home. This November, Georgians decide a governor, a United States Senate seat, every congressional seat, and a long list of state and local offices that will shape daily life far more than most national headlines ever will. In a state like this one, a single precinct is the story.
This is a pitch for a seat, yours, occupied, and for no candidate at all.
According to the Georgia Secretary of State, registration closes Monday, October 5, six days from now, so confirm you are on the rolls before you plan anything else.
Early voting runs October 13 through 30, with Saturday hours required by law, and Election Day is November 3.
If you live somewhere else, look up your own deadline today.
Those are the details. The decision underneath them is simpler than the details.
Three weeks ago I said a room only stays a democracy if the people in it keep choosing to take their seats. This is me asking you to take yours, and the ask has nothing to do with whether you will agree with the person in the next booth. The country needs you both there. Show up. That is the whole assignment.
The peach sticker is just the receipt.
In Community and Conversation,
Jim
Georgia Voting Stickers
P.S. I am selling the Limited Edition of All Pride, No Ego through my site: signed, numbered in the order the orders arrive, your name written inside by hand, and thirty days in The Room at the League of Radical Kindness.
