Everyone I know is doing a kind of “rights / opportunities / benefits inventory”.

Checking to see what rights/opportunities they have now that they can’t count on in the future.

Thinking about who they need to protect and what they need to secure. Because what’s coming is all about subtracting. Not adding.

Folks are thinking about pre-existing conditions and social program funding and access to reproductive services and the people we love who will be banned or at risk of deportation and whether we can manage to marry in time and whether our job will be protected and can we organize and will we be able to vote and will it count and what happens next….

A lot of people were already living these lives of frantic desperation. Now more will feel this perpetual insecurity.

And we will feel the loss as the world pulls away from us. Then passes us by. The pity of people in countries with access to health care, higher education and labor protections stings.

We will thrash about as we continue to fall behind.

Our hard lessons. We are interdependent and interconnected. To be feared in the world is no substitute for being respected.