Wake Up

Exhaustion is not powerlessness. We still have our voices, our votes, and each other.

I watched Maarva Andor’s speech again today.

Yes, Andor. Star Wars. Fiction.

But fiction doesn’t invent the human struggle against repression.

The stories that stay with us are built from history, occupation, resistance, fear, collaboration, courage, propaganda, prisons — and the terrible human habit of convincing ourselves that what is happening around us is somehow still temporary.

They are built from the slow normalization of things people once believed could never happen where they lived.

We tell these stories because somewhere inside us, we recognize them. And because sometimes fiction can say something plainly that reality has made us too exhausted to see.

It’s time to wake up.

Not tomorrow. Not when the next line is crossed. Not when someone finally uses the perfect word that convinces everyone that what is happening is serious enough.

Look around you.

People have spent months saying that surely this is temporary. Surely there are limits. Surely the courts will stop it. Surely somebody will intervene. Surely Americans will never tolerate that.

And while we have been waiting for the reassurance of “surely,” the boundaries have kept moving.

People have been taken away. Our own citizens have been swept into immigration enforcement actions. Americans have been held in detention for days, sometimes without access to their families or lawyers. People have been detained simply for recording federal officers.

The government has fought in court for broader power to keep more people locked up.

Americans Ruben Ray Martinez, Keith Porter Jr., Renée Good and Alex Pretti have been killed by federal immigration and Homeland Security personnel.

Families have watched unidentified masked agents take people away. Americans have learned to carry proof of citizenship in their own country.

Carrying papers.

In the United States of America.

Journalists, lawyers, elected officials and ordinary citizens have had to fight simply to see what is happening inside detention facilities and enforcement operations.

And still we keep searching for the moment when someone will officially announce that the emergency has begun.

There won’t be an announcement.

Power rarely arrives at the door and introduces itself honestly.

It arrives as an exception. Then another. And then another.

It tells you this one person deserved it. That this group is dangerous. This protest is disruptive. This journalist is dishonest. This judge is illegitimate. This citizen should have complied. This right is inconvenient. This restriction is temporary.

That this is only about them.

Until the line moves again.

And again.

And one day people look around and wonder how the extraordinary became ordinary.

That’s the part of stories like Andor that matters.

The people of Ferrix didn’t wake one morning to discover that an empire had materialized out of nowhere. They adapted. They worked. They paid their bills. They cared for their families. They learned which streets to avoid and which things not to say too loudly.

They tried to keep living.

Human beings are remarkably good at adjusting to circumstances we should never have accepted in the first place.

That may be our greatest danger now.

Not that Americans don’t care.

That we are tired.

We have been flooded with outrage so relentlessly that yesterday’s impossible thing becomes background noise when tomorrow’s impossible thing arrives.

And that exhaustion is useful to anyone who wants power without accountability.

Because exhausted people stop looking. They stop showing up. They stop believing their presence matters. And they begin telling themselves that someone else will fix it.

Surely someone will save them.

But democracy has never worked that way.

There is no cavalry coming.

There is us.

Millions upon millions of ordinary people whose power has never depended upon being louder, crueler, richer or more heavily armed than the people who would dominate them.

Our power is more ordinary than that.

And so much larger.

We can speak. Document. Organize. Protect our neighbors.

We can fill streets peacefully. Challenge unlawful government action in court. Support journalists doing dangerous work. Attend school-board meetings and city-council meetings and legislative hearings.

We can call representatives until their phones ring every minute of every day.

We can register voters. Help someone get to a polling place.

We will vote early.

We will vote.

And we can refuse the oldest trick authoritarian power has ever used: convincing people that resistance is futile because power looks overwhelming.

Power wants desperately to look enormous.
It wants you staring upward.

Don’t.

Look around you. There are millions of us.

That is the thing we keep forgetting.

None of us has to save this country alone. None of us could.

But together, we are not small. Together, we are not helpless. Together, we are the public whose consent gives government its power in the first place.

History is not something that happens somewhere else.

History is ordinary people living through today and not yet knowing what future generations will call it. They will know how it ended. We still don’t.

But we have something they never will.

We have the chance to decide what we do next.

So wake up.
Pay attention.
Find each other.

Speak when they would rather you be silent. Show up when they are counting on your exhaustion. Stand beside the people they are trying to isolate.

March. Organize. Register. Vote early.

Vote.

Make your voice impossible to ignore.

Because freedom does not defend itself. Democracy does not defend itself. Rights do not defend themselves.

People do.

And this is where we stop waiting for someone else to do it.

We fight for our freedom.

We fight for the right to speak, to assemble, to protest, to dissent, to choose our leaders and to live without fear of our own government.

We fight with our voices.
We fight with our presence.
We fight in our communities.
We fight in the courts.

And we fight at the ballot box.

We are not powerless. We were never powerless.

We were overwhelmed. Exhausted. Distracted. Made to feel isolated from one another.

That’s not the same thing.

So wake up.

Find each other.

Stand together.

And fight.

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