04/06/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DNyFGCZAL/
Last Saturday, more than eight million people took to the streets.
The largest single day of protest in American history. One in every fifty Americans. Every congressional district. Every continent.
Many of you made that happen.
You found the venues. You built the coalitions. You recruited your neighbors. You showed up — joyfully in some places, at real risk in others.
And the joy was right.
And the courage was right.
Take a moment if you haven’t yet: you helped make history.
But then Sunday came.
And nothing had changed on its own.
The regime was still there. The war was still happening. Generals were still being fired. The machinery kept moving.
And if you felt the gap between Saturday’s catharsis and Monday’s weight — you are not alone. If you are still carrying it, you are not wrong.
This is not a moment for false comfort.
The harm is real. The grief is real. The exhaustion is real.
And in a weekend when so many traditions ask us to sit with death and still speak of resurrection, of liberation, of renewal — we are allowed to hold all of it at once.
We are allowed to grieve and still show up.
We are allowed to be tired and still believe.
That is not softness. That is discipline.
That is what sustained movements have always required.
And you know this already, because Minnesota has already been living inside it.
The Star Tribune published a remarkable account of Operation Metro Surge this weekend.
A Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, calling his children in New Jersey to warn them that they might see on television their father being arrested.
A mother carrying her passport to the grocery store just to prove she belongs there.
A border official, Tom Homan, finally sitting down with state leaders after days of upheaval — and being told by Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt that the entire crisis could have been avoided with three judges signing warrants.
Three judges.
“You guys are different,” Homan said.
“Damn right we are,” Witt replied.
And then the surge ended.
Noem gone. Bovino out. Federal presence withdrawn.
Not because power yielded easily — but because a state, its counties, its people refused to stop standing in the way of harm done in their name.
That is what moral courage looks like when it is practiced by ordinary people in ordinary institutions who simply will not stop showing up for their neighbors.
They did not win because they were powerful.
They won because they would not quit.
And that pattern is not just local.
It is spreading.
Rebecca Solnit pointed out something the cynics missed about last Saturday’s “No Kings” marches.
They said it was a feel-good spectacle.
But the data says something else.
Thirty-four percent of participants heard about it through an organization — up from ten percent in the People’s March in January 2025.
Nearly half were already members of a group.
Two thirds came from suburbs, small towns, and rural places.
This is no longer just outrage travel.
This is infrastructure.
Not eruption — but accumulation.
Not a flash — but a network thickening.
And that matters more than scale alone, because movements don’t survive on energy.
They survive on structure.
And here is the part the cynics still miss:
Joy is not the opposite of seriousness.
Joy is what keeps seriousness alive long enough to matter.
The march was not a break from the work.
It was the work — visible, embodied, contagious.
We are laying the foundation of a cathedral we may not live to see completed.
That is not failure.
That is what it has always meant to build something that outlasts you.
But now hear the warning, because love without clarity is not love at all.
Historian Timothy Snyder has been explicit.
Trump has already attempted a self-coup once — January 6 — an effort to remain in power after losing an election.
Snyder argues he will try again, and that the conditions around war make new paths available.
Watch for the “steady hand” argument: do not change leaders during war, even after an election.
Watch for “national unity”: war requires continuity, dissent becomes division.
Watch for the sacrifice argument: enough death reframes opposition as betrayal.
And watch most carefully for the disruption scenario — a terrorist attack, real or manufactured, used to declare emergency and contest or delay elections.
We have seen versions of this elsewhere. Russia, 1999. Others since.
It does not need to be clean.
It only needs to be confusing enough that people wait instead of act.
Snyder’s warning is simple: none of it works if it is seen clearly.
Surprise is the mechanism.
Clarity is the defense.
So if something dramatic happens in September or October, the first question is not panic.
It is: who benefits from delay?
This is not left versus right.
It is whether elections remain binding.
Whether power remains accountable.
Whether the republic remains a republic at all.
And that question is not answered at the top.
It is answered in the bottom-up work:
Every door knocked in Minnesota.
Every neighbor recruited.
Every county race contested.
Every vote protected.
Every act of participation that makes capture harder.
And here is what is also true:
The arc is not fixed.
Trump is not invincible.
The polls are brittle. The coalition is strained. The war has no clean exit. The system is under stress from within.
This is not collapse in one direction.
It is instability in all directions.
Which means action matters more, not less.
May Day is coming — May 1st.
Workers and neighbors preparing to move together: no work, no school, no shopping.
And after that, the slower work returns: doors, phones, organizing, county by county, race by race, vote by vote.
Not as metaphor.
As practice.
We are building something real.
And it is already stronger than it looks from a distance.
So take this not as comfort, but as charge:
You are not behind.
You are not early.
You are in it.
The foundation is being poured.
And we are not done.
🕊️
