What Are We Going To Do

Gloria Steinem used to say we should stop asking passive questions.

Not "what will happen." Not "what should happen." Just: what are we going to do?

I have been sitting with that question all month, because in less than two weeks, a lot of us are going to have the chance to answer it with our actual votes.

I want to tell you about the first time I understood that my voice and my vote were connected, because I do not think I arrived at activism through a single dramatic moment. I arrived at it through accumulation.

It was testifying-before-Congress footage on the news growing up. It was reading about the Equal Rights Amendment and realizing it still, somehow, was not finished business. It was a green Statue of Liberty headpiece and an "ERA YES" button I wore to an event years later, only half joking, because sometimes the costume says the quiet part loudly enough that people ask you about it.

It was standing in rooms, over and over, where women were talking about pay equity, about menopause, about who gets believed and who gets interrupted, and realizing that every single one of those conversations eventually runs into the same wall: who is actually making the decisions.

That is not a rhetorical question. It is a structural one. And structures get changed by people who show up to vote in the elections that decide who sits in the rooms where policy gets written.

I know election fatigue is real. I know it is tempting to believe your one vote in your one district will not move the needle on anything that matters to you.

I do not believe that, and here is why.

Every policy that eventually protects women, protects workers, protects the vulnerable, started as a vote that looked small in the moment it happened. Somebody's local seat. Somebody's school board. Somebody's state legislature, years before it became the vote that mattered on reproductive rights, on workplace protections, on healthcare.

Gloria did not spend ninety-two years organizing because she believed the system would fix itself if she just hoped hard enough. She organized because she believed in the accumulation of small, unglamorous actions, repeated by enough people, in enough rooms, for long enough.

So this week, I am not asking you to solve anything enormous. I am asking you to do the boring, essential thing.

Check your voter registration. It takes less than a minute at vote.org. If you have moved, changed your name, or simply have not voted in a cycle or two, your status may have changed without you knowing it.

Then make an actual plan. Know your polling place. Know your deadline. Bring a friend who has been meaning to do the same thing and keeps not getting around to it.

Gloria asked us to stop asking passive questions.

I am asking you the same thing, in whatever small corner of the world you actually have influence over.

Not what will happen.

What are you going to do?

Empathy makes us human; actions make us warriors.

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