This is #3 of #52essays2017.

It’s January 20th. Barack Obama is not president anymore. It’s unfathomably terrible.

How could this have happened?  Well, we can’t go over that again. A thousand people have written about it, but that doesn’t matter right now. It’s — what are we doing to do now?

I’ve found myself, very weirdly, finding strange comfort, or actually a compulsion, to do things by hand. I’m not sure what this is about, but I’m feeling a need to write more things with a pen and paper, to keep a paper journal, to make various forms of art, and most recently, to take up embroidery. Is it because I feel like we are headed backwards? Are we going to be sitting around stitching tablecloths?

Maybe I want to be prepared, in case the world somehow collapses and all of our electronic things are taken away, or just cease to be useful. What did people do during the Civil War? They wrote things by hand, or used a printing press. They sewed stuff. They gathered in secret. They had an underground railroad. They figured out who needed what kind of support. They organized.

I feel like things are going to get both more out-of-control with technology, and also more basic. I’m feeling both. I want to keep writing and posting things in the Internets, but to be honest, I feel like it could just vanish overnight.

There are marches happening tomorrow. I feel strongly that it is important to show up and make visible the resistance, but I also feel that this will by no means be enough. I’m probably going to one of them, but it feels more like something to make ME feel better than to change things.

This afternoon, I took my mother to see Hidden Figures. Yes, it was inspiring, but it was also disturbing and upsetting and at the end I wanted to cry. I did cry, a little. I wanted to cry because of all the shit these brilliant women had to endure- the racism and sexism and then being basically invisible for all of these decades. One of them was honored by President Obama at the age of 97. Which was great, but why the hell did it take so long? This movie brought home several things for me, but one thing was that as long as there are terrible laws that restrict and harm people, all the marches aren’t going to do a thing. One of these women, Mary Jackson, was intelligent and driven and wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. But she couldn’t get a degree because of a law that prevented “colored” women from taking required classes at a segregated (white) school. That whole scenario was so disgusting. How many people were denied an education because of this law? Thousands. Millions. (and yes, I know it’s still going on insidiously and in other forms today)

This was the same thing that struck me when I was watching the movie, Loving. Same thing. These people’s lives were affected by racist miscegenation laws. A married couple had to risk imprisonment for being together, in the same state (is it a coincidence that both of these movies featured racist laws in the state of Virginia?).

We can march, to show our numbers, to put our bodies in the street. But really when it comes down to it, is the lawmakers that matter. It is VOTING that matters, and once voting, letting those lawmakers know what we want them to do.

Making phone calls or writing letters might be more boring, or more intimidating, actually, than holding a sign. But it’s just as important.

It fills me with despair that 90 million eligible voters did not vote in this election. For whatever reason – apathy, anger, despair, laziness – those people (and the people who actually voted for T) sealed the future of all of us. Maybe forever. Maybe our Democracy is gone. Maybe all of us will be. Was the right to vote truly not precious enough to them? I guess not.

But that’s what it’s going to take. Voting. (unless, of course, that was –as some darkly predict–our last election) And in between, marching, organizing, making art, writing, getting smarter, getting stronger, finding each other.