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It’s November 7th, and you’re staring down another Trump presidency, one where he and his shit-goblin bros are likely to have even more of an ability to fuck us over. I have two things to say: 1) Don’t panic. Truly. It’s not that there’s no reason to panic — but rather that there are so many reasons to hold it together. 2) Voting and presidential elections are just one small blip in a life where the real political action occurs every day, in how we live our lives and interact with each other moment to moment.

We don’t have a lot of control over what elites do, but we have a ton of control over what we do ourselves each day. That’s where our power lies, and so, I present to you without any authority except that I felt like writing this, a definitely incomplete list of things you can do post-election. These are things to care for yourself, to feel better, to look out for others, to continue to fight against fascism and for a better world for everyone — and to use the next two months to get ready for the next year and the next four years. There will be losses, but there will also be wins. Above all, there needs to be action.

Self and Friend Care

This is basic, but a good place to start. Read on for more community-building suggestions in other sections.

• Check on your friends — not just yesterday and today, but periodically. See how people are doing.
• Ask for the support that you need. It might not always be available, but you’re not going to get your needs met if you never vocalize them.
• Continue to cultivate queer joy, whatever that means to you. Do drag, break out your pride gear, have a get together with your gay friends in public, watch your favorite queer show or re-read your favorite queer book. This is really so uniquely to you, but the important thing is to remember you’re just as much you as you were a few days ago and no one can take that from inside you.
• Take care of your body. When we’re upset we can forget that we need water and nutrients and sleep, but guess what you still do and you’ll feel a lot better if you’re not neglecting yourself. You can even decide to do more for your body.
• Give animals and kiddos in your life extra care, love, and fun. This is just fundamentally nice and rewarding in and of itself, so why not?
• Get outside and into nature if possible. It’s healing — for real.
• Clean your space and do your chores if you’re able. Prepare for when you might not have the time or energy later.

Deepen Your Community Involvement and Organizing (Or Get Started)

I had someone ask me how they can tap into our local community yesterday. They told me they were asking because they genuinely didn’t know, which is delightfully honest. So let’s begin at the most basic starting square.

• Gather with your friends IRL if you are able to or gather remotely. This is basic community-building! You’ve gotten started.
• Ask your friends what they do, where they volunteer or organize, and if it sounds good and they’re down, see if you can go with them.
• Don’t have friends or don’t have friends who do these things? (No judgment!) Pick one thing and start going regularly. Just be honest about being new, listen, learn, be nice and talk to people. An incomplete but starter list of options is below.
• Match the activity to your abilities, interests and risk tolerance – if extensive physical activity will deplete you, then there are in fact phone/computer-based ways to plug in. If you hate cooking but are good at taking notes, maybe it’s better for you to plug into court watch than it is for you to commit to cooking community meals. Do you find yourself hanging out with the kids at family functions over the adults? Maybe you can help provide volunteer childcare at community meetings so parents can more fully participate.

Now, you might have to organize something yourself, depending on where you live. The things that use your skills or that your community needs might not yet exist. Recently, I met the singular person who started an LGBTQ center in a small town. Once it was started, people gathered around them, but sometimes it takes one or two people deciding that your area needs a thing and just making it happen. Sure, you’ll make mistakes. People will get mad at you if you stick your neck out and do literally anything. But nothing actually worth doing happens without facing down obstacles.

Types of Community Involvement and Organizing

This is a wholly incomplete list, but it’s just to get you started. Any of these types of organizing can be things that you and friends start in your area if they do not exist where you are (you might not have a local community fridge, for example), or that might have existing groups working on them already that you can talk to (there is a community fridge already so maybe you want to see if the people who stock and maintain it need help or donations). You get it!

A strong note up front. The most important thing is consistency and reliability. If you say you’re going to show up, then you need to show up. Saying you will do something and then backing out is worse than never signing up in the first place because it makes a hole. So, please be honest and realistic with yourself and others about what you can and cannot do.

• Gather People Together Socially or Go To Social Gatherings: Whether you’re just getting your friends together for coffee or doing something a bit more organized like holding a sober space for people to just be, this is where it starts, right? This is the stuff of life, the way that people meet each other, and how we can refill our own and others’ cups. It’s also how we strengthen the network and community of people we can reach out to in hard times and for organizing.
• Have a Meeting: Are there people you already organize with or friends who you might want to organize with? Get together and talk about what’s next and how you’re going to respond and what you’re going to build.
• Get to Know Your Neighbors. Literally. Do you know their names? Do they know you? Your physical neighbors are the people who will be closest to you, and you to them, in the event of an emergency or anything else happening on your street. If you can build up rapport and friendship with them, then even better! Now you have friends who live near you!
• Food / Meals / Grocery Distro / Biologically Life-Sustaining Stuff and Mutual Aid: Whether you’re stocking a community fridge, cooking with Food Not Bombs, or collecting donations and supplies to distribute to unhoused people — keeping people fed and supplied with hygiene basics is key to our collective survival. Also food is a basic human right.
• Non-Food Mutual Aid: People need help cleaning, moving, navigating state benefit systems, obtaining free homegoods or other items, paying rent, and more. You can help organize digitally so people can connect and help each other, or you can join an existing mutual aid group and offer your help or skills when and how you can! You can organize a “free store” with friends — it doesn’t have to be permanent, and can be a popup. You can organize a queer clothing exchange or participate in one. It’s getting to be the time of coat drives and gathering donated winter supplies, so if you see a need going unfilled, don’t be afraid to find a way to help meet it. Unhoused people need supplies and support when facing eviction from camps. You don’t have to do everything or anything big. Even the smallest stuff helps.
• Harm-Reduction and Birth Control Access: You can help distribute harm reduction supplies like fentanyl test strips or birth control supplies like Plan B, condoms, and pregnancy tests. There are groups that already distribute these for free that you could potentially volunteer and table for, or you could start one. If you have clinics in your area that offer abortion services, you can volunteer as a patient escort. You can help fundraise for abortion funds.
• LGBTQ and Trans-Specific Mutual Aid: Whether we’re talking about mental health support groups, sobriety support, help with obtaining gender-affirming care, legal support, or survival support (like food, clothing, housing), you can tap into helping your local queer and trans community. This might be something small if you live in a more rural area, or there could be a number of orgs and events and groups if you live in a city, but, especially, young trans and queer people need the support of older queer adults right now.
• Court, Jail, and Legal Support and Bail Funds: Protesters and activists continue to face repression by the state and local institutions (like academic ones), and also people just living their everyday lives face unjust persecution at the hands of the justice system each and every day. You can join or start a local Court Watch (Fiona Apple famously started court watching and I love that) and also help pack the courts when activists have court dates. You can volunteer with a local bail fund (because bail typically needs to be paid in-person, it is helpful if you can be someone who does this), help drive people to court dates, or help people raise funds for bail or defense. You can participate in or organize letter writing nights for people in your community who are in prison or jail, or find a queer incarcerated penpal through Black and Pink. You can also consider joining your local National Lawyers Guild chapter and volunteering (you don’t need to be a legal worker to volunteer). As we all know, immigrants are going to face severe dangers from this administration, so consider volunteering with or finding ways to support local orgs that provide legal services to migrants.
• Keep Spaces Running. You can also help staff a volunteer-run community space. This is all going to be very hyper-local, but maybe you have a local collectively run anarchist bookstore, or maybe there is a brick and mortar free store, or a drop-in free clothing exchange for queer people — and you just need to show up and keep it open so that other people can come in.
• Find ways to welcome new people. If you are someone who is already organizing in your area, consider how you can open up opportunities to welcome more people into the work that you’re doing, if that’s safe. How can people find you or get in touch? Are people on point to respond to volunteer inquiries or to answer questions? Consider meeting with other groups to talk about what you’re each doing and working toward right now so that people can be more connected and in the know, and less isolated.
• Protest! This could be a whole article in and of itself, but you, yes, you, have a right to both attend and organize protests.

Assess Your Personal Security Practices

Don’t panic! But also, be safe. Let’s talk about security culture.

If you’re engaging in any kind of activism, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the basics of security culture. Essentially, security culture boils down to how and with whom you share information or engage in discussions or planning in order to keep yourself and your fellow organizers safe. There’s more to it than that, but there are multiple guides around that get into how to practice security culture, and they’re lengthy, so I’m linking them.

Following the basic tenets of security culture, it’s time to assess and improve your digital security. You can do this from the comfort of your couch with a cat or dog cuddling you, even while crying, so it’s a cool thing to look into right about now.

1. First and fucking foremost friends, this means not saying shit in group chats or chats or on social media that is explicitly or implicitly violent towards the future administration or others. I know we all have feelings, but you really, truly don’t want to be sitting in a courtroom listening to FBI Special Agent Fuckface reading back the flippant thing you sent to the group Snap, okay? This really goes back to security culture, but remember that even private social media is essentially public.
2. Now that that’s over, you can also look into securing your laptop, tablet, phone, what-have-you with a VPN, at least one browser that does not track your searches or browsing (like Tor), and strong passwords. I swear if your password is still like the name of your favorite character followed by “1234” I am going to lose it. You need long and different passwords for each thing. Store them securely.
3. Secure your phone. Do not use face or fingerprint or whatever else they’ve come up with for your lock screen. Have a passcode only and make it as long as you can, ideally at least 8 characters. Did you know cops are allowed to physically hold your finger on your phone to unlock it? Yeah. But also, there are a lot more protections when it comes to forcing you to give up a passcode, and hopefully you get to talk to your lawyer before anything like that happens. Do not have previews of messages or notifications on your lock screen. Also, there’s a secret way to track your phone’s location via an “Advertising ID” that you should turn off.
4. Download Signal for messaging. It’s an app that encrypts messages and a lot of people use it and so should you. A note that while Signal messages are end-to-end encrypted to the point where staff cannot access your messages and therefore cannot furnish them for a subpoena, someone who has access to your phone or device with signal on it can definitely still read your past messages. Luckily, Signal has a feature where you can set messages to disappear after a period of time.
5. You can also use services like Delete Me to wipe your data from the internet.

If this sounds like you’re preparing for high levels of surveillance, it’s because you are. You should assume monitoring and surveillance, especially because with each and every day, technology advances and it gets easier for cops, corporations, and the state to invade our privacy and monitor our digital activities.

Do Some Disaster Preparedness

Community is KEY to weathering both metaphorical and physical storms. But also, with the knowledge that climate change-fueled disaster could continue to occur at higher and higher rates and that our future administration is not likely to do much for any of us in the event of an emergency, a basic level of individual preparedness is a good idea and is something you can just kind of lowkey work on over the next few months. Yes, “preppers” and hardcore “survivalists” tend to be conservatives fantasizing about surviving the end of the world alone. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about making sure you have what you need to make it for a couple of weeks without easy access to water, electricity, heat, or the ability to travel. This is also not just about you. If you have a basic ability to take care of yourself during a “natural” disaster, then you are also taking pressure off relief efforts and freeing yourself up to be a community member who can help others. You might even have something that really helps someone else! Here are some very basic things you can do/can work on having on hand:

Things to have:

• • A written/printed/otherwise physical list of important phone numbers because we all know we aren’t memorizing numbers these days. This list can also include important addresses and any other important info you might need to reference (like key medical info someone may need for you or your family). Store it in a plastic baggie in an accessible place (like clipped to your fridge).
  • 2-3 weeks worth of shelf stable food. This is canned and dried stuff. Try to have a balance of foods you will actually want to eat (so not just beans lol). Make sure you have a couple can openers.
  • Emergency water and water containers. Use up and refresh your supply once a year. If you live in a house or other situation where it’s possible, work on a way where you can collect rain water or runoff — that can be useful not for drinking, but stuff like flushing toilets. Bonus points if you work on having ways to purify water, but a general note that flood water is nasty and basically cannot be easily purified to a point where it’s drinkable unless you have a pretty serious filter.
  • A big ol’ rechargeable battery and keep it charged. The one I have can be solar-charged and it’s SO useful when the power cuts out and oops I did not in fact charge my cell phone that day.
  • A good first aid kit. Make sure you have your emergency medicines like epi pens and inhalers stocked.
  • Some kind of knife and ability to cut stuff. You can also add a hand saw to this.
  • Do you have a fire extinguisher??? You should.
  • Do you still have N-95 masks in your house? You ought to. You can get some at just about any hardware store.
  • An old-school, battery-powered radio so you can listen to emergency messaging.
  • If you have a car, try to always have at least half a tank of gas. This just means stopping for gas more often. It doesn’t cost anymore to do, but it does mean you can drive a decent distance without access to gas near you if necessary. Also, make sure you keep some water, an emergency blanket, a PHYSICAL LOCAL MAP, and a shovel (if it snows where you live), in your car. You can also add a few energy bars and a first aid kit if you’re feeling flush. I also tend to keep work gloves in my car in case I need to Do A Thing, and they’ve been more useful than you would think.

Things to do:

• Check in with your family, friends, neighbors, emergency contacts, what-have-you ahead of time about a disaster plan.
• Take a wilderness first aid class. (I still need to do this.) The difference between wilderness vs normal first aid is your assumption about access to medical treatment. With wilderness first aid, you’re assuming you may have to wait hours or days for professional medical treatment, and so you’re treating wounds, injuries, breaks and sprains accordingly. Learn how to treat different kinds of wounds and injuries! A puncture wound is treated differently than a cut, and so on.
• Right there with wilderness first aid — attend a Stop the Bleed training. These are primarily oriented around treating gunshot wounds, but to be not alarmist — there are other situations (car accident, bad fall, etc.) that can lead to an injury where a person is at risk of severe blood loss. Learning to stop a person from bleeding out could save someone’s life.
• If you use GPS a lot to navigate and (like you don’t memorize phone numbers) don’t hold a lot of map stuff in your head, memorize some key evacuation routes for yourself, both walkable and drive-able.

Study Your History

Study queer movements of the past. Look at how organizers and protesters got their communities involved. Look to the Lesbian Avengers, Act Up, Combahee River Collective, The Transexual Menace. Our community has been through hard times and we can learn from how the activists of the past resisted and cared for each other through them.

Make Your Own Fun, Create, Do What Makes You You

The world does in fact need your art, and your smile, and your joy. You do not just have to doggedly move through life working, eating, sleeping, organizing, and doing nothing else. Take some time to be silly. Draw, write, dance, lip sync, rock climb, do scary makeup — live in spite of it all. Remember to gather with friends and loved ones as the days grow darker. Have a party. Don’t let despair take your light.

If I’ve done what I set out to do, maybe you felt somewhat adrift but now you’ve got some forward momentum. NEAT! Do you see the people around you, in-person, online who are also bummed? Those are your allies. You’re not alone, not at all. And all in all, what these election results mean to me is that we’re about to be very, very busy. We have just a few short months to get ready for the start of four years and beyond. There’s a lot of work to be done. We can do it together.

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