You immerse yourself in the many different groups fighting Trump’s policies. You spend time facilitating healing circles for the mutual aid community that’s been supporting immigrants under attack. One strange night you get smuggled to an underground meeting with folks who are supporting a high-profile whistleblower high up in the Trump administration. She was outed and is feeling suicidal — you help connect her with resources to steady her.
It’s deeply fulfilling work. And as you move around, you see the ways we are living in a culture of death. You see the community isolation and the frenetic pace. You see groups moving at the speed of light, often without a clear sense of purpose — just driven by a sense of need and reactive to the latest crisis.
You bring your spiritual gifts. You bring in musicians and body workers. You find poems and healing practices. You organize community events to help weave some of these different groups together. Oftentimes the different parts of the movement don’t even know the other is out there — even though their missions overlap. You try your best to help ground the movement.
Over the next months, you see small political changes around you. But it feels like barely a dent amidst the national scene. Despite lower poll numbers, Trump continues filling the government with his loyalists. The courts eventually approve his Schedule F reclassification — 50,000 government workers are now being systematically replaced by Trump loyalists. Bureaucratic fights rage across many institutions. Trump installs judges across the country who gerrymander election maps in multiple states to give Republicans long-term power. But your heart tears as you see the language of fear and violence growing: immigrant communities terrified by right-wing militia patrols, increased violence against peaceful protestors, attacks on emissions standards, and exaggerated calls for political arrests.