Two Crosses. That’s All.

Life is full of decisions, most of them trivial and a few of them not. Move abroad or don’t. Buy the ice cream. Date the idiot. None of them feel small in the moment—but once you’ve committed, once you’re in the current of whatever you chose, there’s a strange relief to it. The options collapse. You know who you are, at least for now. The only time this logic fails completely is when the choice involved driving over your teacher, in which case you’ve forfeited the relief and most other things besides.

Sunday was the German federal election, and for weeks the country had been in full saturation mode: vote, choose democracy, stand against hatred, carry the social contract forward, defend freedom—the whole rhetorical artillery. I normally dismiss anything that shares oxygen with tabloid television, but this one I actually believed. Get your ass to a polling station. I don’t care about your hangover. If you can’t manage two marks on a piece of paper, someone considerably more motivated than you is making those choices instead, and their preferences might be genuinely alarming.

What I do not want: my theoretical future children clicking their heels across the groomed lawns of the Fourth Reich because enough digitally-savvy people decided voting was beneath them. Fascism isn’t hypothetical—it’s what happens when the people who know better decide the whole thing is too stupid to participate in. The Pirate Party was on the ballot, for what it’s worth. If nothing else, that’s a reason to show up. Two crosses. Democracy isn’t asking that much.