A Ballot Should Not Ask a Family to Choose Which of Its Members Is Real

The vote four days from now is being described as a decision about augmentation. It is not. It is a decision about whether we will let a technology redraw the line of who counts as a full member of a household, a workforce, a country — and answer it, disastrously, with a ballot. I hold no brief for either camp. The governing coalition oversells the future; the Naturalist bloc oversells the past. But both have accepted the same poisoned premise: that the roughly five percent of us who are augmented and the ninety-five who are not can be sorted into separate schools, separate hiring pools, separate ideas of the nation. History is unambiguous about where that sorting leads. We have drawn this line before, by blood and by faith and by paper, and it has never once made a people safer — only smaller. The honest question is not who is enhanced. It is whether we still believe a country is the sum of its people, or only of the ones it finds convenient. The ballot cannot answer that. Only we can.