How We Fight - Day 1: We're Still Standing

Elton John on set for the I’m Still Standing video, Cannes, France, 1983.

[Note: throughout 2025, I’ll be using this column, How We Fight, to explore just that – how we do what it takes to make us a true democracy – even as others continue to push against it. How we see through the haze, cut through the noise, and keep the dream alive. Because we can.]

Let me start this letter by saying I have nothing to report on how Trump’s inauguration went. I didn’t watch it. Instead, I focused on properly celebrating Martin’s 96^th birthday and on preparing myself for what comes next. For what comes, now.

Memorial for a Dream (Or, Getting Our Fight Back), my 2025 MLK Day public letter, was built on the idea that yesterday wasn’t just about Martin but about us and the kind of society we want to live in. That’s why the thousands of Americans who converged on Selma in 1965 were so important. Yesterday wasn’t just about the past but about the future. And it wasn’t just about remembering. It was a call to action. It was about realizing that we’re on the cusp of making real a dream that certain Americans have carried since our founding and that we, simply by virtue of being alive at this moment in history, get to see made real.

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” Martin admitted in the last sermon he’d ever give, the night before he was killed, “But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mount. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

And he was right. We will. But only if we work for it. Because, for the first time in our nation’s history, those of us who want an America that works for all of us vastly outnumber those who only care about one that works for some of us, for those they consider “their people”. That’s why it’s so important that we grasp the situation we’re in, one where a shrinking minority no longer believes in democracy, now that they’re no longer the majority.

But they also realized something; that an America where every American gets a vote is one where they can no longer win. So, they simply stopped playing that game. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked their about-face, their shift from trying to use the vote to rule society to actively undermining the vote. But despite it all, both we and democracy are still standing. And that means this is our game to lose.

This remains true despite the fact that Trump, on his first day in office, signed executive orders to withdraw our nation from the Paris Climate Agreement, and that end birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented parents. He declared a national emergency across California’s southern border, which will allow him to mobilize troops, pardoned more than 1,500 people charged with storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and issued an order that supposedly renames the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.

As ridiculous as this, especially that last order sounds (and is), it’s important that we take it seriously, as it speaks to this administration’s ambitions, ones bolstered by divine destiny ideology, beliefs that God has “given them the victory”, along with a mandate to “go in to possess the land, which the Lord your God giveth you to possess it.” Just because it’s ridiculous doesn’t mean it can’t lead to this group’s deployment of our military to achieve its goals, just as is being done along the border. He’s repeatedly referred to Canada as the “51st State,” has declared his intention to take Greenland from Denmark, and has vowed to take back the Panama Canal from Panama.

It’s SO appropriate that this group’s call for people to descend on the Capitol on Insurrection Day was billed the “Jericho March”. Because, like in the Hebrew Bible (in a campaign that most archeologists believe couldn’t possibly have happened because the site had been uninhabited for thousands of years before the supposed battle), storming the Capitol, with their tactical vests and Confederate flags, their shouts, horns and attacks on officers (I can’t imagine a scenario where BLM protestors could have behaved similarly without triggering a massacre) was about making themselves appear far larger and more powerful than they were.

And that’s not all. According to the story, the Israelites, under strict orders from God, went on to kill every person in Jericho; men, women and children, as well as the oxen, sheep, and donkeys. Only Rahab, who’d collaborated with them, and the members of her family were spared. This is the framing they’re using to make sense of the world we live in today, and gets to the second Really Big Lie we must reject – that this administration, this militant Christian faction that orchestrated Trump’s return to the White House and that’s giving him counsel, this religious supremacy and American supremacy ideology is unstoppable. It isn’t. In fact, its only play is convincing us that it has power it doesn’t have.

Which, gets back to the first Really Big Lie, one we’ve already touched on above; how this faction that secured just a third of the American vote for Trump in a razor-thin election is somehow presenting itself as a democratic majority when they so clearly aren’t. But even more inexplicable is that we’re buying it, which is exactly what businesses who are already abandoning their commitments to diversity and/or climate consciousness are doing – everyone from Meta and Amazon to JPMorgan Chase and Ford to McDonald’s and Walmart – all in the first two weeks of January. There will be so much more to come, like a snowball rolling downhill. But every bad thing that will happen starts with letting them reset reality; letting them sell us on a lie.

In season 2, episode 5 of Queen Latifah’s The Equalizer series, a matronly Aunt Vi had an experience where a white-identifying woman in a store used a threat to call the cops as a weapon. The cops came and, as expected, automatically treated the word of the woman who called them as definitive. Later, she’s speaking with Delilah, the girl who’s essentially her granddaughter who was there, saw the whole thing, and filmed it (it took video proof of the other woman’s aggression to stave off the already mounting escalation from the officers).

Delilah: I get that. I mean, but we can’t stop how they behave.

Aunt Vi: Delilah Fulton, don’t you buy into that lie. Don’t do it. I’ve been protesting… all my life, from sit-ins to George Floyd. Same fight, over and over again, to be seen, to be heard to be human. And it hurts. And that hurt gets turned into rage, because rage is – is much easier to live with. If we’d taken the… easy road today, and left without being heard… that’s what poisons our spirit. Don’t do it, love. Don’t buy that lie. Don’t let them sell you on that.

This, refusing to be sold on the lie, was what my granddad Olden was silently doing when, while he opted to step into the gutter, yielding to the approaching socially white couple, he made sure my feet stayed on that sidewalk.

Activist Hank Wilson, in 1983, at a time when the world had just discovered AIDS, and as the religious right was weaponizing their deaths, as anti-gay hate crimes were on the rise, as well as calls to remove gays from jobs, evict them from homes and quarantine them in concentration camps said it this way. “AIDS is causing homophobia to surface. It’s not new, it’s been there all the time, but it’s an opportunity for those who are homophobic to vent, and I’m ready for them because we can handle it. I know we can handle it.” And we can.

There are 1,385 days between today and the next presidential election, and there are 1,460 days until Martin’s 100^th birthday. And the knowledge of that alone is good news. Because we know something none of those who came before us knew – exactly how long this engagement lasts. When January 15, 2029, arrives, we will finally have chosen between the two warring ideologies we’ve carried within us since our founding – all of us or some of us, equality or supremacy, indivisible or factionalized, democracy or something else. Something less.

So, that’s where I’m starting this morning. I’m looking forward – focusing on the future we’re creating today. It’s what Martin was speaking to, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail when he said, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” It’s what he was evoking in Why We Can’t Wait when he said, “We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.”

And it’s what playwright Lorraine Hansberry, regarding the escalating acts of terrorism being committed by the likes of the KKK, everything from lynchings to church bombings, was speaking to when she said: I think, then, that Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. That they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps – and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.

That immediately reminded me of the many forms resistance took in WW2. For instance, despite the iron hand of the Nazi military machine, the Jewish Partisan Education Foundation has documented over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings. Further, in The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, Martin Gilbert described the incredible breadth of resistance and the many forms it took:

In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the [Nazis] their final wish to gloat over panic and despair.

Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.

So, when do we fight? Today, tomorrow, and every day over the next 1,460 days.

Where do we fight? Anywhere and everywhere we see injustice occurring or oppression increasing.

And finally, how do we fight? In every way we can.

I’m reminded of Hillel the Elder, who said: “If I am not for myself, who shall be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?” Every part of that rings true for me today. I hope it does for you, too. Because, we who believe in democracy are the majority, and the only way we don’t win is if we don’t stand.

I want to end with an Elton John classic that captures so much of what I’m feeling right now. I’m Still Standing was released in 1983, the same year that Hank Wilson was speaking out about how “righteous” Americans were sharpening their pitchforks for use against AIDS victims, claiming, not unlike what happened to the people of Jericho, that God had ordained these people’s deaths; even as they created justifying narratives against the broader LGBTQ+ community. The song, a defiant affirmation of resilience, became an anthem.

“I’m still standing, better than I ever did. Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid. I’m still standing after all this time, picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind. I’m still standing.”

It’s the same fortitude and resilience that everyone from Aunt Vi to Granddad Olden, from Holocaust survivors to Pride marchers held, and that’s our birthright.

In my next letter, I’ll start delving into practicalities, how, each day, over the next four years, we stand, including the Really Big Lies we must learn to identify and reject.

Until then, this is Day 1 of what I truly believe to be the last engagement. Only 1,459 more days to go.

We’re still standing.