I voted last week, voted early, to get it out of the way and not have to worry about getting up early or staying out late. I’m coming to the end of a serious hell-period at work and Mr. A is leaving tonight for a week overseas, and the time change is fucking with Kick’s sleep in a way it never has before, and it didn’t seem sensible to leave this to chance.

I didn’t expect it to make me feel like a superhero or anything. I’ve been in the streets every other weekend, family beside me, against misogyny and family separation and the general garbage fire of the world. We are not un-engaged right now. Kick insisted we bake cookies for the volunteers at the local Dem organizing office, insisted her father deliver them.

I didn’t expect voting to make me feel like a superhero; these small things don’t feel like enough. A friend might have to leave the country. Another found swastikas spray-painted in the park where his children play. The synagogue in Pittsburgh, a friend’s father prays there. This is about faces I see every day. Faces I want to continue to see.

My new OB-GYN mentioned to me that if I wanted to get an IUD I should do it soon. While they were still easy to obtain. We both thought about Mike Pence, and shuddered.

To so many people quoted in these Trump supporter stories, the rage seems so abstract: They think someone somewhere is getting something free and they don’t like that. The caravan is miles away. Football players are kneeling, but only on TV. Their taxes have gone up but they can’t tell you by how much. They’ve heard things, think they’re at risk, like the people in Chicago suburbia scared shitless after 9/11: there is no danger here at all.

The small things I can do — vote, donate, take my kid to rallies, write letters, write posts — don’t seem like enough. But I have to believe, as we all hold our breath today and think and wish and work and love, that we are building muscles we can use for years to come.

I went looking for this video this morning, from the 2011 protests in Wisconsin against Scott Walker and Act 10.

I remember all the carping after we lost the recall election and lost the election against Walker again, all the worry that “we” had done this wrong, had talked too loud, run this person or that person and that’s why we lost. We should have had better ways to do this then, and it’s impossible to say that’s wrong. But it’s also possible to say that our rage today is built on those bones.

That loss, those losses, felt like dying, and we said at the time, pay attention, this is what’s coming for all of you. It gave us a language to use to resist, and if we prevail tonight and in the coming days, if we rise up like that again and lose and lose and keep losing those losses will pile high enough for us to climb.

The small things I can do don’t feel like enough, and that’s because by themselves, they’re not.

A.