I’ve been pretty crappy in this whole RESIST! thing.
Yes, I wrote the letter(s) and yes, I keep thinking—thinking matters!—but I see exhortations to Do X! Y! Z! on Twitter, and I’m, like, Um. . . .
WELL, I’ve finally found something which suits my house-bound ways: I’m gathering information for the Resistance Manual, on online, open-source, er, source of resources. I’ve already added citations to the readings list, as well as plugged in data for Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Minnesota.
It’s all pretty basic, thus far, but you don’t get to the complicated stuff without that basic foundation, so I think I’m, y’know, actually contributing something.
(I’ll keep adding information to my Life during wartime page, if only because I have my own idiosyncratic interests that may be best kept confined to this here site.)
Oh, and I did, finally, manage to call my Congressfolk: Rep Clarke (Thanks for boycotting the inauguration!), and senators Gillibrand (About those Sessions/Price/DeVos votes. . . ?) and Schumer (Yeah, vote against Sessions! Yeah!). Schumer’s DC line was way busy, so I called his Manhattan office—hell, it all gets to them.
Like many people, I’ve developed a thing, which is to say, a problem, with calling people I don’t know. Pre-email I never would have won a cold-calling award, but now that there are ways besides actually phoning to people I don’t know I prefer. . . not to phone people I don’t know. It’s a bit of an issue.
Anyway, my friend T. mentioned that she’s programmed her politicians into her phone and I thought, Hey, that’s a mighty fine idea. Then, once I did that, I thought, Hey, why not actually, y’know, maybe, call ’em. So I did.
It was nothing, as of course the rational part of me knew. They don’t know who I am, they don’t care how eloquent I am, if they saw me on the train they wouldn’t point and giggle She’s the lady who stammered her comment, and they’re not writing Ms. Absurdbeats of Lefferts/East Flatbush called to say. . . .
Nope, all that mattered was that I gave an opinion on something the rep/senator did, and they noted that.
So, if you’re like me, not crazy about cold-calling politicians, don’t worry: they have people, and those people know how to write Right On! or Ugh! and then politely issue you off the phone and not think about you again.
And I bet that when I do call again, they ain’t gonna remember me—which is just how I like it.
AbsurdBeats 
from margaret walker
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;
For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and playhouse and concert and store and hair and
Miss Choomby and company;
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when, in
memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;
For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry their playmates and bear children and then die
of consumption and anemia and lynching;
For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something—something all our own;
For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;
For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs
and societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.
Oh yes, I liked and retweeted that sign! There were a number of great Princess/General Leia placards.
“Let a new earth rise”—lovely!