“Democracy wasn’t a set of dry documents nicely laid out on office stationary – it brimmed in the lips of thousands of souls and debated in dozens of accents as it crossed the street from one neighborhood to the next. It was the smell of stale coffee and bodies packed into an old community center. It was the typos in the fliers. It was exasperation, realization, illumination – a knockdown, drag out, sweaty, tearful, impassioned process of people making decisions together.”
