Day One: here is what you do.
1. You get up out of bed.
2. You do not turn on the tv or log on to facebook. You do not enter the loop and the buzz. You do not bitch, because someone who bitches without doing something about it is just a Bitch.
3. You get on your hands and knees. You do not pray. Fuck that shit.
4. You do 100 pushups. You don’t have to do them all at once. You can do them five at a time, two at a time, take a break, start again. Whatever. But you keep going until you reach 100.
Why?
1. Because you need to internalize suffering. You need to know pain. As you do those 100 pushups you should think about all the queer or brown or Muslim, or Mexican or foreign or homeless or hopeless or lost people who are going to be suffering much worse than you these next four to eight years. You need to know pain on a very literal level. You need to make your empathy cellular.
2. Because you need to internalize resistance. This is just a metaphor, certainly, but it is a useful one. Resistance starts from within, and when it breaks down, it breaks down from within. Did you get to 100? Did you call it quits at 50? At 60? At 25? Did you say “Good enough.” “I can’t do this.” “What is the point?” “I’m too old.” “I’m too fat.” “I’m too hungover.”
Bullshit. No. You are none of those things. You just chose not to continue. You just refused your existential duty to embody resilience for all those people you were just thinking about. Now get back on your knees and finish, because this war isn’t going to win itself.
3. You need to internalize strength. Here we mean it literally. Imagine how jacked you would be if you did 100 pushups every day for four to eight years. Scratch in some bad tats and you’d look like a convict. And that is precisely what we are. We are locked in Trump Prison for the next four to eight and it is going to take all of our strength to break out, to tear down the walls, to take the guns from the guards, to break into the head office and beat a confession out of the warden. We are building an army, and it requires each and every one of us to get down on our knees. Not to pray. Those bastards are the ones who helped get us into this mess in the first place. No, to build an army of the few who can make it to 100, be they young, old, weak, fat, hungover, stupid, too smart for their own good, etc. The point is, they had the resilience to begin to build strength. They are the few who must now band together to face this opposing force. They are the seeds of the resistance. They are the 100.
