Day One: A Habit of Resistance

This past Saturday was Trump’s 100th day in office. Today is May Day, 2017 (or it was when I began writing). For the next hundred days, I’ll be writing about resistance, mine and others’. More properly, I will be writing resistance.

In the past, I haven’t been good at regular updates. Routine and I aren’t friends. But I’m making a public commitment.

And I’m making another one: if Trump is still in office in one year, on May Day, 2018, there will be a massive protest, and I will help organize it.

I thought there should be one this year — and there was, the Day without Immigrants. Also, the Democratic Socialists organized traditional May Day workers’ rallies. But, in a year — if it’s necessary, which I think it will be, since solutions to this emergency move slowly — I envision something much different: I envision all of America pouring into the streets, and life coming to a standstill, and the entire country saying with one voice that must be obeyed, NO.

But before then, much work.

I’m not a memoirist. Definitely not a regular blogger. I’m a novelist and poet and occasional tortured essayist — writing that is nonlinear and/or capacious comes most easily to me. My hundred days here will be a hodgepodge. I might shift into free verse, for instance, because

the internal rhythm of sentences
is sometimes holy,
the intimation of order
a balm.