Post-election, pre-inauguration reading material

The weekend is upon us, and boy, do we deserve one. I said yesterday that my goal is to be more thoughtful about what I see during President Donald's second term, and it is; and I also said there are a lot of reasons to believe this term will be much worse than the first one. I'll get into those in the near future, but in the meantime, I ran across a few links about how to prepare for what lies ahead.

Reading these ten tips made me feel a lot better, and would be worth your time even if Donald hadn't won. Here's a part I especially liked:

Handling fear isn’t about suppressing it — but it is about constantly redirecting. One activist described to me two motions in the universe: shrinking or expansion. …

We can shrink into a cacophony of “that’s not fair,” which fuels the fear of repression. Or we take a page from the great strategist Bayard Rustin.

Black civil rights leaders were targeted by the government of Montgomery, Alabama during the bus boycott in the 1950s. Leaders like the newly appointed Martin Luther King Jr. went into hiding after police threats of arrest based on antiquated anti-boycott laws. Movement organizer Rustin organized them to go down to the station and demand to be arrested since they were leaders—making a positive spectacle of the repression. Some leaders not on police lists publicly demanded they, too, get arrested. Folks charged were met with cheers from crowds, holding their arrest papers high in the air. Fear was turned into valor.

I've been telling my kids to remember that literally tens of millions of our fellow Americans care about women's rights, fighting racism, protecting trans people, and preserving democracy. We have a lot of power if we stick together and refuse to succumb to fear.

My girlfriend Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote for Time about what she'd like Congress to do. The final item on her list is something I've seen mentioned more than once: Democrats currently in office can get a lot of people appointed and other things done over the next two months, if they move fast.

And a lot of the stuff in this Bluesky thread is just a good idea. I mean, I need to renew my passport anyway. The author is a queer woman married to another woman, and there is useful stuff in there about taking steps to protect your rights as spouses in the event that the legality of same-sex marriage changes. (Note that on Bluesky, it's not always clear if a thread has ended—click the last post you can see, and it will show you whether there's more.)

If any of this seems excessive, well, it would be great if that turns out to be the case. Hope for the best, plan for the worst, as they say.

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One of you beautiful people sent this to me early Wednesday morning, and I hope it's okay if I share it here:

Just woke up to the news…after initial devastation, this wise old crone is here to tell you that we WILL survive.

American democracy can handle this shock to its system—so says this American Studies major.

Part of the reason is because of people like you—and the children you're raising. I feel the same way about my son.

My kids actually all voted for Jill Stein, but other than that: Yes. I don't know what happens next, but there are a lot of great people in this country. And that includes all of you. (I might not be able to say that when I have thousands of subscribers, but at least in this moment, it is absolutely true.)

The Fun Part

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