Here is it December 8, a single month since the election, though it feels as if it happened far longer ago and simultaneously feels as raw and abrasive to our spirits and prospects as it did the minute we first learned the outcome.
A political version of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—needs one addendum: Action. Everybody processes their feelings about the outcome of the election at their own unique pace. Some people get stuck in one of those first five stages. But it’s way too early to claim that people have been hanging around one of those stages for too long at this point. Some people just need more time than others. And for all but a few, the outcome was surprising as well as shocking, so shaking it off is going to last longer than it might otherwise.
The good news is that many people have moved on to the sixth stage and are not only pledging and planning resistance moves already, but they’re also engaging in them. Action, the cure for despair. Very encouraging.
But as we see this commitment to fight emerge, we should not forget that the resistance isn’t something invented November 9. America’s history bristles with resistance. Every great reform was begun by resisters to the established order. Resistance has been a bit more prevalent recently than during some other periods. Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the fight for LGBTQ equality and dignity, the reproductive rights struggle, climate hawks, and the rising up of indigenous people in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico against the relentless plunder of their land all have resisters at work who didn’t start yesterday.
Many of our Democratic leaders have in the past said disparaging things about such groups and the individual Americans in them when they ought to have been standing shoulder-to-shoulder with these resisters all along. Hurrah to those few in the Senate and the House who have spoken up.
Message to the growing number of prominent Democrats who are now talking tough about Donald Trump and modern Republicanism: It’s appreciated. Hurrah. Thanks. This president-elect guy and his cronies are a profound threat to democracy and the planet. Glad to see a glimmer of steel in those Democratic spines. Perhaps it’s too much of a stretch to believe that seeing veterans and Sioux warriors (men and women) holding out in a zero degree North Dakota blizzard with 50 mph winds whipping around them has given these Democrats the gumption to sound off. Whatever, at least they are speaking up. So, again: Hurrah. Scores more need to stand up and do likewise.
However, what’s unfolding right now should not be allowed to become The Resistance™. We don’t need a brand. Nor a pretense in a few months or further down the road that these leading Democrats started the resistance, when, in fact, resisters have been with us all along, often ignored and ridiculed, when they’re not being surveilled, harassed and jailed. Perhaps in the spirit of unifying all of us around resistance to the Trumpkochian agenda and the plethora of other racial, gender and economic injustices, the promoters of this mockery and lack of support will take a breather.