Bead 2: Women's March

Laurie B. on the megaphone at the Oakhurst Women's March.  Photo courtesy of Wendy Fisher.

As soon as I heard about the Women's March on Washington movement, I knew I had no choice.  I was a woman; I was deeply disturbed by the voices and views our nation had legitimized with the election of Donald Trump.  Therefore, January 21 would find me on my feet.

At first, I considered attending the D.C. march.  My son and I would be visiting my mom in the D.C. area for Christmas, after all, and it was only--well, more than 3 weeks later.  Scratch the overstaying our welcome plan.  I briefly considered the possibility of booking a second flight to D.C. for the march, but the thought of all that bouncing back and forth between the same two places made me feel slightly concussed, and I dispensed with the idea.

Early on, my California march options were looking like all the big cities--San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento, Los Angeles.  All except the L.A. march were essentially within striking range of me, and tolerable.  I assumed I'd go to San Jose, near where my grandmother lives, and maybe persuade her to come along.  But lurking in the back of my head the whole time was the notion of a local march, a down-home Sierra foothills march for my neighbors and me.  Who would organize such a march?  I worried the answer was nobody. 

So, I toyed with the answer being me.  What would that look like?  Would I get 20 people?  Fifty?  How few was too few, the point beneath which you shouldn't publicly demonstrate because it would suggest your cause wasn't valid?  Or was there no minimum threshold?  What if I wound up being an Army of One?  How would the public view me (or us, if I happened to find a few fellow marchers)?  The Yosemite tourists might be into it; I've always assumed National Park goers are bluer than average.  But what of the good, and decidedly red, people of Oakhurst?  I lobbed these musings around in my head for a couple of weeks, all the while suspecting I would end up in San Jose.  

And then one day, driving through the Central Valley with a coworker on our way to a job site, I happened to bring it up.  I don't know why I did it.  At the time, I wasn't sure it would resonate with her.  Wendy and I are politically like-minded, but just because you occupy the same end of the spectrum doesn't mean you're both about to become activists.  But it did resonate--and beyond that, Wendy had an idea for how to make it happen.

Courtesy of Wendy, I became a member of a private Facebook group, Oakhurst Area for Peace, that had evidently been established for the express purpose of organizing a local Women's March--only now the group's founder, Susan, would be flying to D.C. for the big one.  It felt weirdly scary, posting for the first time to the group's page that I was considering putting on an Oakhurst march, and would anyone possibly be interested in attending?  It was official.  I'd gone public.  I couldn't back out now, or I'd be a flake.   

People were interested, and Susan offered to help me organize, notwithstanding her own plans to actually march on Washington.  It was mid-December.  There was a little over a month to prepare.  I met Susan for coffee, and loved her immediately, her quiet presence, her authenticity.  We made a to-do list:  Facebook event page, press release, talk to the cops.  I think that was the whole list at that point, and I remember already thinking that sounded like a lot, a real stretch.  But I was in.

By the time the march actually rolled around, the list had swelled to include 1) posting the event to our community's online calendar, 2) posting the event to the website linking all the so-called sister marches, 3) printing off and distributing dozens of flyers, 4) notifying every local liberal lady I could think of, 5) posting regular updates on our group's Facebook page, 6) checking the weather obsessively as soon as January 21 appeared in the 10-day forecast, 7) researching sign slogans, chants, and protest songs, 8) shopping for a sign-making party to be held at my office the morning of the march,  and--once I realized I'd have more than the 50 marchers I'd conjured up in my wildest dreams--buying 9) a megaphone, and 10) special event insurance.

For the march had gone mildly viral, at least by small-town standards, with over 200 online RSVPs as of January 20.  Every day I got emails from would-be marchers, asking for more details, offering help.  Some mentioned their hometowns, and the march began to look like a many-stranded web weirdly converging in Oakhurst, where nothing ever happens.  There were 7-mile strands from Coarsegold, 18-mile strands from North Fork, 27-mile strands from Mariposa, 52-mile strands from El Portal.  Initially it looked like there might be Valley strands:  46 miles from Fresno, 60 miles from Sanger, 90 miles from Visalia.  But as the larger march movement went for-real viral, the Valley started organizing its own events, and most of those strands curled in to rally close to home.

I didn't sleep much the last few nights before the march.  Three nights out, I went to bed rehearsing what I might say into the megaphone.  What does one say into a megaphone?  Do I need to give a rousing speech?  Scream with my fist held high?  Repeatedly holler "I can't hear you!"?  None of those things sounded like me.  I just wasn't a megaphone kind of person.  That day, I had invited my friend Laurie B. to share crowd-revving duty with me.  She is a professional musician, and presumably no longer subject to stage fright.  We'd talked it over on the phone, and she was happy to get involved.  But still, trying to fall asleep, words kept floating around in my head, bumping into each other, vanishing and sparking back into view.  "Welcome, everyone..." "So happy to be here with you..." "Let me tell you why I march..."

The night before, it was mostly the weather that kept me up.  Our march was coinciding with a winter storm.  Winter storms are relatively rare in our neck of California, and a big deal.  This one promised only an inch or two of snow at my house, but I am a white-knuckled snow driver, and envisioned a 30-mph drive all the way to town.  At higher elevations, the snow could be a show-stopper.  In Oakhurst, it was forecast to fall primarily as rain, but resisting in the rain might not be what people decided to do with their Saturday mornings. 

Naturally, I woke before the alarm.  The first order of business was to look outside and make sure my road was passable to one such as me.  It was.  Second, get moving.

My road, just after dawn on March morning.

 

In town, I put up a few signs to guide non-locals to the Oakhurst Community Park, where we would be gathering.  I made a big run on donuts.  I reported to my office, where I scurried around in a fever of print jobs, coffee prep, and last-minute Google queries.  People arrived for the sign-making party, brimming with energy, bearing road reports and craft supplies.  And we got started.

Sign-making party in action.  Photo courtesy of Wendy Fisher.

I had planned to leave the sign-making party well ahead of the march start time, around 9:30, to welcome those few go-getters who might show up at the park early.  But as all who know me will attest, I'm on a perpetual 15-minute delay, minimum.  So it was 9:45 before I headed out, my co-leader Laurie B. and friend Marcia in tow.

The parking lot was chaos.  It looked like a school drop-off zone.  There were people milling around everywhere, chatting, tucking kids into strollers.  There were signs and pink pussy hats, and only a handful of parking spaces left.  I pulled in grinning like a crazy lady, bowled over by the turnout.  The 200 RSVPs hadn't been something I felt like I could get attached to, what with the weather and advent of sister marches in the Valley.  And yet, it seemed, here they were.  I ran around welcoming people, probably appearing to them like one of those exuberant souls who habitually approach strangers, usually for purposes of bearing witness.

Today, I was a witness--not for Jesus Christ, but for the resistance.  Strange, a time when the resistance is the majority rather than the fringe.  As of Inauguration Day, only 40 percent of the country approved of the man taking the Oath.  It wasn't that the remaining 60 percent were out here marching per se, but they certainly weren't happy with our nation's apparent trajectory.  I didn't promote my march as a protest, but it was undeniable that Trump's impending presidency gave it breath.  If Clinton had been elected, we wouldn't be worried about losing our reproductive freedom.  If Clinton had been elected, we wouldn't fear the erosion of our civil rights.  If Clinton had been elected, we wouldn't be losing our health insurance.  If Clinton had been elected, we wouldn't be facing irreversible environmental damage.  And if Bernie had been elected--well, that's a soapbox for another day.

In promoting the march, I had suggested that people bring signs bearing positive messages--what we can do, what we will fight for, who we will protect.  We might all be nasty women inside, but here in rural America, I felt it was most effective to frame our gathering as a demonstration of collective strength rather than collective anger.  Moreover, I felt a positive approach would be more inspiring--to me personally, ideally for my fellow marchers, and most ideally of all, for the community at large.

Greeting dozens of sign-holders at the park, it seemed that most had taken my suggestion to heart.  Build Bridges, Not Walls.  Straight But Not Narrow.  Human Rights Are Not An Option.  Healthcare For All.  Respect the Earth, Promote Diversity.  Peace.  There were also a few references to tiny hands and comb-overs, and a skilled rendering of Donald Trump eating the earth.  It was just the right amount of seasoning for the stew.

Gathering at the park at the start of the march.  Photo courtesy of Wendy Fisher.

Three days earlier, I had fretted to Laurie B. over the phone that I didn't know how to lead a march.  She had wisely responded that there would be so much energy there, so much power in the group, that I wouldn't need to worry about saying the right things, or sticking to a program.  The march would happen organically.  The group would lead itself.

Laurie was right.  The march unfolded just as it was supposed to, owned by everyone.  We tested out the megaphone, delivered welcomes.  We observed a global minute of silence, intended to unite all of the people marching around the world, and those who wanted to march, but weren't able to.  A sheriff's deputy made some public safety announcements, which I relayed.  A new friend of mine, Karen, read a poem she'd finished writing just that morning.  Her voice was strong and impassioned over the megaphone, the words thumping like shoe soles on pavement, like a heartbeat, like fists.  From today / We move / We move mountains / And we move the hearts of all of God's creatures / We move the world / And the world, also, / Moves us.  It became the march's invocation.

Marching along Road 426 in Oakhurst.

Our march route was very short, just one-third of a mile from the Oakhurst Community Park to a prominent intersection on Highway 41.  There isn't a lot of contiguous sidewalk in Oakhurst, and so the options were limited as to where to move a bunch of people safely.  For the backbone of the march, I chose a relatively quiet road with no sidewalk, where we could occupy the entire right lane in a big, cohesive blob.  From there, we marched along a sidewalk on a main road, ending at that road's intersection with Highway 41, where the sidewalk fans out into a large public corner with a small amphitheater.

Tamara in song.  Photo courtesy of Bill Klemens.

At the corner, our march became a stationary demonstration.  We waved our signs at the passing traffic, sang and chanted along with whomever was on megaphone duty, and cheered at every approbatory horn honk or peace sign we received from drivers-by.  One of our number, Tamara, was a trained vocalist, and treated us to beautiful renditions of This Land is Your Land and What the World Needs Now over the megaphone. Another marcher delivered Amazing Grace, complete with an improvised, secular verse about love.  My friend Gracie led us in a chanted reminder, Somos todos inmigrantes, that "we are all immigrants."  Later, we chanted Si, se puede, "yes we can."

Our demonstration on the corner, as viewed from across Highway 41.  Photo courtesy of Bill Klemens.

Highway 41 is the southern thoroughfare to Yosemite, and despite the weather, cars streamed continually past.  There were a few obvious naysayers; I remember one southbound truck that sped away from the intersection with a middle finger held aloft from the driver's side.  The middle finger stayed up until the truck was out of view.  Another truck driver gunned his engine menacingly as he departed the intersection.  But those guys were in the minority.

Certainly, there were onlookers who quietly disagreed with our message; for example, an op-ed writer in our local newspaper, who described idling at the stoplight, marveling that our merry band of resisters "hadn't even given the new president a single day before they attack his positions."  Although the writer appreciated the Oakhurst marchers' acting "responsibly and politely in their display of civic involvement," he questioned our commitment to human rights.  For example, he speculated that, because we presumably live in homes with fences and doors that lock, we might not be as comfortable with open borders as our signs suggested.  Ah, well.  He's only human.

There along Highway 41, on that drippy Saturday, we were buoyed up by many, many travelers smiling and calling out of car windows, beeping their approval, waving and whooping at us.  The ratio was staggering; for every angry redneck, we had 15 or 20 carloads that showed support.  On the other hand, perhaps this is what happens when you are expressing a mainstream set of values, as I believe we were.

A carload of fans.  Photo courtesy of Bill Klemens.

After about an hour at the intersection, marchers began to trickle away in small numbers.  In the spirit of this ever-evolving event owned by all, I consulted with several others, and we decided to finish strong, all as a group, and march back to the park together.  Tamara sang us one last song, a benediction of sorts.  Then, as I led the procession back down the sidewalk, Tamara moved fluidly into chant mode:  The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated.  Love, Not Hate, Makes America Great.  We yelled from our hearts the whole way home.

Oakhurst Women's March.  Photo courtesy of Bill Klemens.

One of the last megaphone messages of the day was given by Tim, Susan's husband and another founding member of Oakhurst Area for Peace.  He urged all of us to remember that this was only Day One.  We couldn't let our momentum fade after the march.  We had to plug all the spirit we'd shown today into action.  Make phone calls.  Write letters.  Attend public events put on by our elected representatives.  In just a few days, for example, there would be an opportunity to meet with a staff member of Congressman Tom McClintock, the Republican who was supposed to be representing our interests in Washington.  We had to show up; we had to make the line go out the door.

For me, and my weekly action project, the Oakhurst Women's March is quite literally just the beginning.  Bead Two means there are fifty more to go.  This particular bead may well be the biggest of the year; it required a full month of preparation, and has occupied a lot of my time in its aftermath, too.  I couldn't do this for every bead, and still go to work and be a mom, partner, and friend.  But I'm glad it worked out this way.  I went hard off the starting block, and for that I've been rewarded with a veritable Big Bang of collective energy--201 people, the march's official count, gathered together in density of purpose, now scattered in action.  I'm proud to be one of them.

Bead 1: Inaugural Vigil

On Inauguration Day, the last place I wanted to be was in front of a television.  Radio didn't sound good either.  Although I'm a pretty enthusiastic NPR listener, I didn't like the idea of things being delivered into my ears uninvited.  For example, I really didn't want to hear anything about the inauguration--unless it was to hear that it had been called off, or that he had been booed off the stage or swept away by a freak tidal wave that magically pinpointed only the lecherous, wealth-hording xenophobes in the crowd.  As it was my suspicion that none of these interventions would actually happen, I felt it was safest to keep the radio turned off.  And so it was a silent drive into town that morning for Bead 1, the vigil I attended during the inauguration.

The day didn't immediately bode well for the vigil.  I awoke to steady rain and a voicemail message from my son's school district that classes were delayed for two hours due to "wintry road conditions," which to my eyes appeared to consist only of puddles.  It could have been a deal-breaker, as I wouldn't be able to both attend the vigil and see Zac safely off to school.  But Zac must have felt the larger call to action, because he bravely offered to walk himself to the top of the hill to catch the bus after my departure.  I accepted, and after dispensing a dozen or so reminders about his lunch, his umbrella, his phone, his coat, emergencies, and contingency plans, I hugged him goodbye and set out.

Half an hour later, as our country stood by for our proverbial peaceful transition of power, I stood by with about 20 others at the crossroads of our town's two highways.  We stood shoulder to shoulder facing the road, silent, heads mostly bowed under umbrellas--although I had a clear umbrella and found it inspiring to look at the sky and a willow tree across the street from time to time.  The purpose of the vigil was to provide a space for people concerned about the future of our nation to come together and silently reflect, meditate, and pray.  By doing this in a visible location, we embraced a second purpose: to spark conversations in the various passing vehicles about what we might be up to, and why, and perhaps encourage people to do some reflecting of their own.  

Photo courtesy of Carrie Jenkins

Photo courtesy of Carrie Jenkins

With the changing of the guard in 2017, we are downshifting into yesteryear, to a time when overt racism and misogyny in the Powers That Be were acceptable.  At the same time, we are lurching into entirely new terrain, in which self-proclaimed champions of the U.S. Constitution do not balk at the inevitable constitutional violations of our new president, in which purported followers of Christ put a lying, hate-mongering rapist in the Oval Office.  As John Oliver put it not long ago, "This is Not Normal."  So without waving signs or yelling, without chanting or singing or getting in people's faces, we wanted to be a not-normal presence at the intersection of Highways 49 and 41, a silent reminder to commuters and tourists, to our neighbors and friends, that we are entering not-normal times.  (I should clarify that none of the stuff in this paragraph came from the organizers of the vigil. I'm free-styling here, but it feels good.)

As we stood in silence, I struggled with clearing my mind.  I am not a good meditator.  There is always so much to think about; for example, did Zac make the school bus?  What else do I need to do to get ready for the Women's March tomorrow?  What's for dinner?  I was a little disappointed in myself for having such cluttered and mundane thoughts during this, my inaugural Act of Resistance.  

After a while, I dispensed with trying to meditate and did something that comes easier for me.  I prayed.  I am not religious, and have not been for some time.  I really don't believe in any sort of conventional God.  But when I tune my inner frequency to my idea of Something Listening, which could be a number of different entities ranging from the collective unconscious, my inner Higher Power, quantum particles, and distant stars, I do feel something.  I prayed to this Something under my clear umbrella, eyes closed.  I asked for peace for all the people affected by the transition today, particularly for those who were despairing or frightened.  I asked for guidance in the fight I was preparing to undertake.  I gave thanks for the comfortable bubble I am privileged to occupy, and asked to be made somewhat uncomfortable.  I asked for a sense of unity with my fellow earthlings--both like-minded and disparate.

We stood in place for 45 minutes, during which time the inauguration happened.  It rained.  My feet got cold.  From a truck idling at the intersection came an exuberant "America's great again!" right around the time when Trump would have been taking the Oath.  It seemed so boyish and innocent; it made me laugh.  Others delivered staccato honks and thumbs-up as they passed.  A homeless man came and stood with us, chatting quietly with the woman on my left.  When we disbanded afterward, he encouraged us not to vote for a relative of his who plans to run for County Supervisor, but is evidently not a man of the people.  He said "God bless" to us as he walked away. 

My first official action, Bead 1, was a quiet, somber affair.  But for me, it was the perfect way to gather strength for the coming year, and years.  I left feeling ready.

Gearing Up

I don't know if anyone has noticed my nifty new countdown timer.  More than likely, you've noticed the weird ads that have popped up underneath it--unidentified, diseased-looking organs purportedly assailed by probiotics, allusions to Hillary's criminality, etc.  I swear I didn't put those there!  They came with the countdown timer.  They unfortunately make the timer, itself, look like an ad, but it's not.  It's supposed to be marking the hours until Trump is inaugurated, and my official year of action begins. 

Recently, however, I've been engaging in a lot of action to prepare for my upcoming actions.  I'm organizing a sister march to the Women's March on Washington, to be held in my small town on January 21.  Although I'd feel lucky if 50 people showed up, it's still taking a lot of coordination.  There are Facebook updates to post, conversation threads to weigh in on, flyers to print, local businesses to visit, calls to make.  I stopped by the sheriff's office the other day to see if there was anything I needed to do to to ensure the march didn't run afoul of the law.  The lady behind the glassed-in counter didn't know, but gave me some numbers to call.  She also leaned in close and confided that she really wished she could come herself, but she was concerned because of her job.  Attending a Women's March could be viewed as serious boat-rocking.  I offered to put her in a costume, she counter-offered to dress as a furry mascot of some sort, and we parted with laughs.

In Oakhurst, I'm told, this is a real concern.  It's not just that our town is overwhelmingly conservative.  It's that its conservative politics are laced with anger and inflexibility.  People do feel they need to keep quiet.  People do worry about their jobs.

Before Oakhurst, I lived in northwestern Montana.  It was far worse there, politically-speaking.  Here, I've been driving around with a Birdie bumper sticker for almost a year.  There, my tires would have been slashed by now, particularly in the rural areas that were my haunt for hiking and skiing.  One of my closest friends in Montana received a death threat in exchange for his environmental activism.  He also once opened his mailbox to find a bag of shit in it.  At the time I was living in Montana, a incendiary radio personality hosted an annual Earth Day burning of a giant green swastika in the radio station's front yard.

So, Oakhurst doesn't scare me.  Still, last night, at a gathering with a local peace group I belong to, veterans of the group shared some stories that caught my attention.  At a peace demonstration during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an enraged driver rammed his truck up onto the sidewalk in an attempt to get at the demonstrators.  Some were children.  Nobody got hurt, but I'm sure everyone got scared.  Others have been spit on while demonstrating.  That's just in our quiet little mountain town.  In Fresno, one of our group members reported, a silent peace demonstration nearly turned into a brawl.  The police had to be called in to break it up.

With my Women's March, I'm choosing not to dwell on the myriad backlash scenarios we may be facing.  I'm not saying there won't be backlash.  We will almost certainly experience angry horn honks and/or invective hurled from car windows.  Oakhurst isn't much of a pedestrian town, so it's less likely that we'll have face-to-face encounters with the opposition.  To be safe, though, we agreed at the gathering last night to re-approach the sheriff's office in a different way.  Rather than just trying to secure permits or whatnot to keep the March legit, we'll now be notifying the deputies that we might need their protection, or at least their watchful eye.  I want people--including families with children--to feel comfortable attending the March, and I want to feel wholly comfortable promoting it.  A little "Big Brother Watching" might be just what we need in this case.

I'm hoping to cultivate the March into a positive, proactive demonstration of what we wish to protect over the next four years (women's rights! civil rights! Native rights! safety and equality for minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ!).  I don't want to dwell on That Guy, even though I'm sure we would all love to personally punch him in the face.  It would be cool if his name didn't appear on a single sign.  God knows he gets enough press as it is.  It would be cool if even the most conservative of drivers-by had to really scratch his head on how to scream at us without looking like a complete ass.  I'm not naive; some assholes have no qualms about being racist, or sexist, or whatever.  But I'm hoping that our March, by focusing on big, humanizing issues that we will fight for rather than against, will serve more to bring our community together than to widen the divide.

Here is the flyer I made, and am feverishly distributing, for the Women's March on Washington - Oakhurst, CA.

Another item on the gearing-up agenda is that my beads arrived in the mail.  The package did not look like it contained $50 worth of merchandise.  It looked like it contained a very small paperback book.  I felt another pang of guilt for not having acquired my beads in a crunchier fashion.  I should have gone to a thrift store and bought a couple of old beaded necklaces for a couple of dollars!  I should have checked with crafty friends, worked out some kind of wine-for-beads trade!  I should have remembered that I had a small teacup on a forgotten shelf that has, for years, housed about a hundred multicollar beads that came off a necklace I used to love!

But no matter.  It is done.  My beads are beautiful and, as I said, they will keep me stringing for longer than just the first year, if I so choose.

This picture inflates the number of beads I got for $50, as I've added in about a dozen of my favorites from the forgotten teacup I mentioned.  This is an 8 oz. Mason jar.  Sigh.

I'm anticipating this will be my last post before Inauguration Day and my official start of action.  Thereafter, my posts will mostly serve to describe the weekly actions I'm taking:  Bead 1, Bead 2, Bead 3, etc.  I'm looking forward to ongoing discussion, stories, and shared tips from my fellow action-takers.  Year One, here we come!  

The Big Bead Acquisition

I was in Santa Cruz over the weekend for a work retreat, and saved a little time for what I imagined would be my big bead acquisition.  It was Santa Cruz, after all, grooviest of coastal towns.  I'd conjured up images of a dusty little shop a block or two from the ocean, owned and operated by a grizzled hippie-surfer, full of beads and pipes and vintage Grateful Dead posters.  The beads would be mostly secondhand, the spoils of trade-ins or estate sales or what have you, and they would be kept all together in a giant wooden trough.  I would run my fingers through them, feel the weight of the individual stones and glass nuggets, and would divine my 52 beads with my eyes closed.  My bill would come to about ten dollars, and I would trade Dead show stories with the owner for a while before walking back to my hotel, beads tucked in a little paper bag in my purse, thumping against my hip to the beat of the revolution.  

My acquisition took a detour, however, when I learned that, while my imagined shop certainly may have existed in Santa Cruz at one point, it doesn't appear to anymore.  Google got my hopes up with names like Monkey Girl Beads and The Bead Trade, but further research and drive-bys indicated they'd all closed down.  The one store that might have fit the bill was closed on Sundays.  I drove back from Santa Cruz empty-handed, battered by the rain, and beset by all manner of weather-related obstacles, including a downed power line on Highway 17 that stopped traffic for 2.5 hours.

And today I went shopping on the Internet.  I found an operation based out of Palo Alto, which felt like the next best thing to a real-live experience because it's only 180 miles away and a small business.  My proverbial trough of other people's beads imbued with other people's stories was not to be found, but there were a lot of nice colors and shapes.  The site is definitely intended for crafty people, a tribe to which I do not belong.  There is a lot of jargon about thread gauge and different techniques, like "mala" and "laddering" and other things I'd never heard of before.  It was frankly a little distracting, and for a moment I almost forgot my purpose, thinking I should really check out some of the site's free tutorials before embarking on a project as daunting as a one-year, 52-bead necklace (or bracelet?  I still don't know.) 

So, I spent $50, feeling a little sheepish and bourgeois.  The good news is I have enough beads for the standard four-year presidential term.  So, if Mr. Trump goes the distance, and I stay strong, I can make not just one, but four bracelets (or necklaces).  Alternately, if any of my local friends want to take part, but don't have cash for beads, I will give you some of mine.  Just let me know. 

Finally, I want to share an action tip my coworker gave me yesterday.  Subscribe to Daily Action Alerts by texting "daily" or "action" to 228466, and enter your zip code when prompted.  The service will text you each day with instructions for a simple phone call you can make to take action during the Trump administration.  Evidently, the service tailors the issues and suggested phone calls to your locality, and even patches your call through for you.  I just signed up yesterday, and haven't received my first text yet, but will post updates once I've had a chance to check the service out.

First-ever post on my first-ever blog

With the election of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. Presidency, I'm feeling a lot of personal firsts coming on.  Some of them have already happened, as on the evening of November 8, when I'd pored over my New York Times app for long enough to know that it was all crashing down around us, and deliberately dropped the F-bomb in front of my child.  (I'm not saying I've never cussed in front of Zac; I'm just saying that this time I did it loudly, unabashedly, and just two feet away from his ears.)  Another first that already happened was that I created an event on Facebook, a human right's march to be held in my small town on January 21 in solidarity with the Women's March on Washington.  

Then there's this, my first-ever post on my first-ever blog.  The blog is the second half of a two-part idea.  The overall theme of the idea is "Save the world from Donald Trump!"  The first part of the idea is to commit myself to doing some action in this regard each week for the first year of Trump's presidency.  The actions can be big or small.  I like to think that in my most ambitious weeks I'll be chaining myself to giant sequoias or going to jail for justice--but I recognize that even if I don't wax quite that ballsy, and instead perform dozens of quiet, unsexy tasks like phoning my members of Congress or attending services at a mosque, that will still count for something.

Put more seriously, what I intend to do is be one of many foot soldiers fighting for the communities, concepts, and systems most in need of our protection during the impending Trump years.  I will fight for our minority, LGBT, immigrant, and Muslim-American communities--for their right to equality, physical safety, compassion and understanding.  I will fight for human rights whenever I see them disregarded or downplayed.  I will fight for a healthy environment--for maintaining and restoring natural ecosystems, for protecting our wilderness areas, for keeping our public lands in public hands, for acknowledging our role in climate change and taking steps to slow it.  I will fight for democracy, and I will fight for peace.

The second part of the idea is to be accountable for what I'm setting out to do, and if at all possible, to inspire others to take their own weekly actions.  Enter the blog.  I'm frankly a bit of a Luddite, and I really haven't spent any time in the blog world, other than unwittingly, as a result of how-to Google searches and recipe queries.  So this is all new to me.  But I felt it was the best way to address the second part of the idea.  Otherwise, the "accountability" bit would have to be fielded by one of my girlfriends--for 52 weeks, poor thing!--while the "inspiring others" part would probably be attempted on Facebook, and would serve only to get me unfriended by all of my cousins.

But what's with the beads?  The beads are the visual aid to the idea, a way to make it tangible and measurable.  In the next few days I'll buy myself a whole bunch of beads of every color and personality, and a length of chain or twine to put them on.  Each week as I complete an action, I'll string a bead.  By January 20, 2018, depending on the size of the beads, I'll have either a bracelet or a necklace to wear or give away.

I came up with the idea of 52 Beads about two weeks after the election, after having passed through successive clouds of disbelief, apathy, sick amusement, and delusional optimism (the latter referring to the two- or three-day period in which I believed that Trump might not turn out to be as bad as we feared, ending with his appointment of Stephen Bannon as chief strategist).  It's been a focal point for me since then, something to plug my energy and belief into, in lieu of moving to Canada.  It's why I was able to wholeheartedly welcome the New Year.  Although the 52 Beads mission--"Save the world from Donald Trump!"-- is idealistic, to say the least, I feel confident I've graduated from delusional optimism because all I'm purporting to do here is my own part.  I will take my own small actions for peace, justice, and ecological integrity, week by week.  I will string my beads.  At the same time, I will contribute to a movement of many, many others opposed to Trump's hateful, regressive agenda.  And with any luck, the beads will flow, the movement will grow, and we will eventually find our way out of this mess.  

A final note:  I have some ideas for actions, but I need a lot more.  Please help me out by posting the actions you're taking, actions you've heard of, helpful links, etc.  I'd love to see this, my first-ever blog, become a gathering place for people trying to make a difference.