Because We Remember

Whenever I hear someone suggest that certain voices should matter less, that some voters should have less influence over the future than others, or that public dissatisfaction can be solved by concentrating authority in fewer hands, something inside me recoils before my mind has fully formed a thought.

It is not an intellectual reaction, it is visceral. The tightening of a muscle. A quickening of breath. The feeling of touching a hot stove and pulling your hand away before you consciously register the burn.

My body remembers. It remembers my mother being taken away for questioning while pregnant with my younger sister. It remembers knowing, even as a child, that our mail was being opened, that private words were not always private, that letters could be examined for signs of disobedience, dissent, or insufficient patriotism. It remembers conversations changing the moment another person entered the room. And it remembers my grandfather sleeping with his clothes folded beside the bed because any night there could be a knock at the door. Not the knock of a neighbor, not the knock of a friend, the other kind. The kind that made people disappear into the black holes of the regime’s prisons.

I was born in Romania and spent my early childhood under a communist dictatorship. Like many children, I did not understand the machinery operating around me. I saw only its shadows: lowered voices, carefully chosen words, and tension hanging over ordinary conversations like a winter fog that never quite lifted.

Years later, I would understand what I had been witnessing. Fear. Not the dramatic fear of movies or history books, but the quieter kind that settles into daily life and rearranges it from the inside out. The kind that teaches people to censor themselves before anyone else has to.

When the Romanian Revolution came in December 1989, the dam finally broke. Years of frustration, deprivation, indignity, and repression burst through the cracks all at once. The world watched the dramatic collapse of a dictatorship. What many did not see was the immense pressure that had been building behind the walls for decades.

The Revolution taught one lesson. The Mineriad taught another…

Only months after Romanians overthrew Ceaușescu, citizens filled Bucharest’s University Square demanding deeper democratic reforms and a cleaner break from the structures of the old regime. My mother and I joined some of those demonstrations. The square pulsed with hope. People believed they were helping shape the future they had risked so much to create.

Then, in June 1990, came a response that felt hauntingly familiar. Protesters were portrayed as threats to stability. The demonstrations were cleared. Thousands of miners were brought to Bucharest after appeals from government leaders to restore order. What followed was not dialogue but violence. Protesters were beaten, journalists were attacked, opposition offices were ransacked. Citizens who had gathered to demand a stronger democracy found themselves facing many of the same instincts they believed the Revolution had swept away.

The lesson was unmistakable. The desire to control does not disappear simply because a dictator falls. It adapts. It changes its language. It wraps itself in the rhetoric of order, security, practicality, or necessity. Yet beneath those shifting justifications often lies the same temptation: to decide whose voices matter and whose do not.

Those experiences shaped how I view democratic participation today. That is why debates about voting rights, representation, redistricting, and access to the ballot do not feel abstract to me. I do not encounter them merely as policy questions.

I experience them as echoes. The context is different. The institutions are different. The continents are different. But the underlying questions feel familiar.

Who gets a voice? Who gets heard? Who gets to influence the future? And how much faith do those in power place in the judgment of ordinary citizens?

As Georgia prepares for another special legislative session touching questions of representation and political power, I find myself returning to those questions. Because I have witnessed the quiet resignation that settles in when people no longer believe they can influence the course of their own lives. I have seen what happens when leaders become more concerned with preserving authority than remaining accountable to the people they serve.

But those experiences left me with another conviction. Control is far weaker than it appears.

History teaches this lesson repeatedly. Efforts to narrow participation often create the very resistance they seek to prevent. The more people feel excluded, the more determined they become to be heard.

Freedom is stubborn that way. It survives in whispers, in private conversations, in people who refuse to surrender the belief that their voices matter.

As an immigrant, I carry a profound gratitude for the freedoms this country promises. Not because America has always lived up to those promises, it hasn’t, but because the promise itself remains extraordinary.

The promise that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. The promise that citizens have both the right and the responsibility to shape their own future. The promise that no person is born to rule and no person is born to be ruled.

Those ideals drew millions of people, including my family, to these shores. They remain worth defending. Not because freedom is guaranteed, but because it isn’t.

Those of us who have witnessed the consequences of concentrated power recognize the warning signs not because we are fearful, but because we remember.

And remembering carries an obligation. To defend a democracy that trusts its people. To widen the circle of participation rather than narrow it. To ensure that every generation inherits not only freedom, but the power to help shape its future.

Because the strength of a free society is not measured by how much power it concentrates, but by how many people it empowers to be heard.