Our ability to participate in government, to elect our leaders and to improve our lives is contingent upon our ability to access the ballot. We know in our heart of hearts that voting is a sacred right - the fount from which all other rights flow.
Interpretation
Voting is a fundamental right that enables citizens to influence their government and improve their lives.
Stacey Abrams emphasizes the critical role of voting as a cornerstone of democracy. She posits that the ability to participate in government and elect leaders is intimately tied to the accessibility of the ballot, framing voting as a sacred right that is essential for the protection and exercise of all other rights. By asserting that voting is the source from which other rights flow, Abrams advocates for the importance of safeguarding this process and ensuring that all individuals can engage in it freely.
In practice
During a civic engagement workshop, to inspire young people to register to vote.
I grew up one of six children with working-class parents in the Deep South. My mother was a college librarian, and my father worked in a shipyard. I never saw them balance a checkbook, but they kept a roof over our heads and got all six of us into college.
I do not Google myself, I do not read comments, and I barely look myself in the eye when I look in the mirror.
My being a black woman is not a deficit. It is a strength. Because I could not be where I am had I not overcome so many other barriers. Which means you know I'm relentless, you know I'm persistent, and you know I'm smart.
The basis for sustainable progress is legal protections grounded in an awareness of how identity has been used to deny opportunity.
I like to solve problems. I know it is a skill set, but it's also an obligation. I grew up with parents who believe that you don't simply complain: you try to find solutions and fix what's in front of you.
Here in Georgia, we continue to grapple with our own vestiges of hate. The image carved into Stone Mountain, like Confederate monuments across this state, stand as constant reminders of racism, intolerance, and division.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every private employer a dictator, every financier a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at his mercy, and no public responsibility.
We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.
We are now vibrating between too much and too little government, and the pendulum will rest finally in the middle.
My father was a statesman, I'm a political woman. My father was a saint. I'm not.
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
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