I stand and step forward in defense of my friends, family, and neighbors who are women, immigrants, civil servants, scientists, black, brown, queer, disabled, transgender, pregnant, childless, or have any other identity or condition or role now under direct threat by the United States government.

As an individual private citizen, I don’t always know what I can do to help, at any given moment. But I will never step aside and knowingly let harm befall my fellow Americans by the agents of a corrupted government who wants to harm them. That’s the bare minimum, and I state it here.

And I hold fast to my own identity as American, even though it confirms my citizenship of the nation that exercised its sacred democratic power to re-elect a frightened and angry old man who has allowed opportunistic oligarchs to run amok in his name. He can claim he does it it my name as well, but he’s wrong.

And I have nothing but the lowest contempt for the actions of a nation which, in its profound illness, has declared war on its closest allies for no reason beyond the would-be sovereign’s personal grudges, a war no less literal for being fought with economies rather than munitions, one that began with betrayals no less real than a treaty-breaking sneak attack. I don’t think there’s much I can do about this right now rather than stand up and shout no, for whatever good that does, so I do. No! No, no. No.

In the end I choose to express my Americanness the only way I know how, standing stubbornly true to myself even when everyone around me wants to pull me down and push my face into the mire of hopeless cynicism, even when I feel sick by it all, so sick that it feels like I can barely get to my feet, sometimes. I’ll do it anyway. See if I don’t.