Now What???

Last Friday, at noon, Donald Trump became the president of the United States.

I’m old enough to have lived through Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes--as adult!  I’ve also lived through Carter, Clinton, and Obama.  I now believe (as anyone who reads this blog probably has figured out) that change has to come from the bottom up and there isn’t a lot that the best president possible can do.  But I’ve also come to realize that a really bad president can do a lot of damage.

Unbelievably, at least to me, I was in the boardroom of a large liberal nonprofit a few weeks ago.  The place reeked of money.  We met with the development director who was wearing pearls and a severe skirt and the CEO who wore a charcoal suit and a muted tie.  The CEO looked like he could have been running a successful corporation.  Therefore it was mindbending for me to hear his speech.  Practically his first word was “Resistance” and he must have repeated it fifteen times in twenty minutes.  He talked about the need for liberal and progressive organizations to work together and support each other and not just stick to their individual causes.

Friday was also the day of the J20 Art Strike.  On Saturday was the Women’s March on Washington.  Monday, January, 23rd will be the Student’s Day of Action.  And this is just the beginning.

I’m an old white man and, although I’m pansexual and polyamorous, I’ve been in more relationships with women than men (although currently two of my three relationships are with men).  I could pass for straight.  In the 90s and the first decade of this millennium I was in a couple of long term heterosexual relationships.  Nevertheless, one of my main inspirations was the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For.  The strip almost always spoke to the culture we were trying to create.  Alison Bechdel stopped writing DTWOF in 2008.  After the Trump election, she was inspired to see what her characters were up to.   Although these comics were done around Thanksgiving, I just found them as Trump was being inaugurated.  It seems appropriate that they are focused on resistance.

All this resistance is important.  Hopefully all this will activate many folks.  Still, I believe in a three part strategy.  (See my post on Strategy, 1/24/16.) We need to continue the struggle, but we also need to continue building alternatives and educating folks about them.  I’ll talk more about all this in some upcoming posts.

Quote of the Day:  “You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear.” ― Lauren Oliver