Attention women, young people, LGBTQIA people, black brown and indigenous people of color, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Arab middle eastern and north African people, religious minorities, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, people with mental health diagnoses, environmentalists, people working in non-profits, blue collar workers, librarians and educators, pro-choice people, leftists, undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, social workers, truth tellers, public transit riders, unhoused people, unemployed people, union workers, union organizers, any organizers, renters, wage workers, single parents, and wise elders.
We will survive this. We will get through this stronger on the other side if we dedicate ourselves to supporting each other and working together. We are our own saviors. We do not need our safety, our rights, our freedoms granted to us by the corporations or government of a country that has repeatedly let us down. Together, we collectively determine our rights and freedoms — and our responsibilities — we secure one another’s safety.
Collective action, intersectional solidarity, community organizing, mutual aid, and careful deliberate resistance. We build and fortify our own durable institutions outside the government and corporate structures that have failed us over and over. We will become citizens of a united, vibrant, loving, nation within a divided, toxic, dying country. We stay steadfast a people united against the forces of tyranny.
This is not to say, “abandon participation politics.” We must also retain our hope that someday this country can actually be the nation it promises, and getting there—of course—requires us not to give up, and keep striving. But we must also be realistic and abandon the fantasy that this country, its economic system, its corporate oligarchy, and its existing institutions are anything but misrepresentations of liberal democracy. There is no point in laying blame for the outcome of an election that was a foregone conclusion set in motion long before the candidate slate was set. We can continue to hope and fight within this system, as long as we save enough energy to build and fortify our own structures of support and democracy outside of it.
The forces of fascism seek to use this system to erase our struggles, our stories, our identities, our livelihoods, and our lives. But they cannot erase our joy, our hope, our peace, and our love. That all lives within our spirits, and they will never reach there if we don’t let them. They only way they can touch our peace and our hope and our joy is if we give up. As long as we want to keep our hope and our joy and our peace, it is ours. And we will protect one another from the outside, and remind one another that that joy and that peace and that hope belongs to us and nobody can take it away.
Here are some rules for getting through this:
- They want us to destroy ourselves. We won’t give them the satisfaction.
- They want us to attack each other, to fight, to compete. We won’t allow that to happen.
- They want to steal our joy, our peace, our hope, and our love. They can only do any of that if we give them permission. We won’t let them take it.
- They want to control what “truth” is and pass lies off as facts. We won’t buy it.
- They want to make us believe we are dependent on them and can’t make it without their institutions and structures. They want us to believe we can’t collectively build our own institutions that give mutual aid, support, and protection to one another. We’ll prove them wrong.