It's Nomination Day. I want you to choose the leaders we need

The fireworks are over.

In places you can still smell the smoke, though soon that should be gone too.

And the budget of the American secret police is now big enough to be the third largest military budget in the world. The secret police who are beating the fathers of veterans. Deporting people who risked their lives for us. Systematically destroying not just families, not just our economy, but very literally the American food supply.

I see loud, un-self-conscious despair, bitterness, and revulsion expressed over and over again in my feed. I see anger and hopelessness and joke after joke after joke about how utterly, irreversibly fucked we are.

And goddamn, but I just don't have the fuckin' time for it right now.

A brief aside on my own complicated feelings

I do not want to, I do not think I should, and I do not think it helps – but my only reaction now, to despair, is anger. I want to be patient, I want to be understanding, I want to give time to mourn and grieve. But for the sake of Christ himself Almighty, we have things to do. We have fights to win. We have lives to save and movements to run and a nation to transform. And for better or worse – I simply don't have the emotions for anything else right now.

The reason this still bothers me enough, intellectually at least, to bring it all up, is that I believe the way we respond to these emotions is central to our success. In Letter from Birmingham Jail, MLK describes the steps that they went through before every protest – and the last one before the protest itself was "self-purification." A process by which the group determined if they, one by one, were emotionally ready for non-violence. Not if they were ready to be beaten – that was simply to be expected. But rather, if they were ready to be beaten – and not retaliate. And I see this, and I'm at least somewhat ashamed that I can't even stop myself from reacting to people on my own side, for the simple expression of their despair.

But as soon as there is a crack in my attention, I remember what we are up against, and I see no time or excuse for any direction but forward.

So let us go in that direction, now.

Here is what we need to do next

I have written about bits and pieces of this, but I haven't tried to lay out the whole of my thinking in one place. In part because the true whole is hundreds of pages, and in part because the time didn't feel right – but now it does. In as few words and steps as possible, it looks like this:

1. Our goal is to improve life, for all people.
2. Not only does government play an immeasurably vast role in that wellbeing – capable of being both positive and negative, of course – but we can't elect our rich people, or our CEOs, or our celebrities. We can only elect our government. So that is where we must focus.
3. "Government" doesn't mean rules or institutions, it means people. The rules are meaningless without the people to interpret them, craft them, ignore them, or carry them out. There has perhaps never been a clearer view of that than now. American legal precedent, without 5 judges to agree on it, simply has no meaning to the Supreme Court.
4. However, Americans – both emotionally, and financially – have been scared away from taking part in government for half a century. Nixon made it acceptable to hate the Government, and Ronald Reagan made it cool, and the Republican party has been intentionally assassinating the character of the institution ever since. As a consequence (and with no help from the cost), nobody wants to run for office. And again so, when there is a call to do so, a tiny fraction of the people we need step forward.
5. But if you ask people to look for people to run for office – then everyone is involved. Suddenly everyone can contribute, because everyone can take the much smaller, much easier, much less personally implicating step. And, that step can still have an enormous impact.

If there is a single thing that we agree on at this moment, it is that we need new leaders. And not just a few. Rather, and without exaggeration, literally hundreds of thousands of them. But if that is the case, then its importance, and scale, and very nature, means that we must involve the whole of country in the search.

And so, I started Nomination Day

Think of the people who inspire you.

Fill out a form, and put their name on it.

Seriously. I mean this. I want you to do it.

And given who you are I am utterly confident that you will choose people a thousand times better than who is in charge now. But as we as a country realize that the path we have been on is pointed fundamentally in the wrong direction, we will look desperately for a better one – and that will not make the looking any easier. The precision and wisdom with which we choose our new path will affect the lives of billions of people. So we must do it with extraordinary care, and evidence.

This is why I am not just trying to collect the first 500,000 people who raise their hands, but to infuse into the American psyche both this novel process, and our novel understanding of what – and who – actually makes life good. My goal for us, as a people, to understand which direction is up. And I want to give us a way to get there. These two ideas are inextricable in my mind. And, at this particular moment, they are the best ones I have to offer. I hope very sincerely you can find something in them that makes your life better.

But anyway. You get the idea.

nomination.day

Because that's how we save the world.