I Do Not Need My Freedom When I Am Dead--Langston Hughes

Yesterday was heartening, welcome, and absolutely necessary to the survival of our democracy. It should be celebrated with pride, and those who took pride have done the country proud and continued its long tradition of peaceful resistance.

But it was only a first step. Where do we go now, those who believe this country's freedoms and institutions must be safeguarded from a dangerous demagogue? What do we do? While it might be momentarily satisfying to produce memes about small hands and chortle about bad combovers and call him Cheetolini and sniff that he's "not my President", the reality is that he is our President, and to deny it does no favors, puts us in sorry league with those who peddle "alternative facts", a phrase which here means lies. Lies, bald-faced and unrepentant. We must not tell lies, nor must we waste time on pettish insults that are easily ignored and feed into the idea that we are spoiled children having a tantrum.

We must fight. We must keep marching. We must keep calling and writing and faxing. Those of us with any means of locomotion must camp outside our congressperson's office when we can, anxiety and fatigue be damned. It's a hardship, and unfair, but we're not shaking off a niggling inconvenience. This is a fight to protect who we are as a nation. I've got my writing fingers limbered and some envelopes and some stamps, and I've got my representative's district office address and Mapquest. It's so little; I am so little, and it might come to nothing, but I have to try. I don't want to look back in ten years or in twenty and be ashamed. I do not want to wish that I had done differently.

I can just hear my mother now. How she would chortle, sneer that I am just being melodramatic. Maybe I am. I hope I am. But I would rather be melodramatic and wrong than apathetic and right. I would rather be embarrassed than crushed beneath the heel of a despot.

I must try to stand even though I cannot walk.