Gracious me, here we all are, a bunch of gray-haired old ladies standing in the mud. It is glorious. We’ve never met, but for some reason we all recognize each other. Hey! Great to see you again! I got a bottle of Annie Green Springs in my backpack. Is that Richie Havens over there?

That’s the superpower of gray-haired old ladies. In our own company, we see our eighteen-year-old souls shining through. We’re charged up, we’re ready, we’re fierce AF, and if the rest of the world thinks we’re invisible, well? Let’s surprise the hell out of them.

The old boyfriends are back too, their remaining silver strands bunched into pencil-sized ponytails. We’re all ready. We’ve done this before. So, so many times.

The occasion was a rally and march outside City Hall to protest, well, every damn thing the new regime has said and done so far, and everything they will say and do, and to stand up and be counted. We don’t have a draft to protest this time. We’re drafting ourselves.

The younger people showed up too, and it wasn’t a huge crowd by Women’s March 2017 standards, but it was an energetic thicket, enough to fill five or six blocks of downtown, and loud, and here’s the thing: we’re just getting started.

What I keep hearing is “Why isn’t anyone stopping this outrageous bullshit? Why are the Democrats so ineffective?” Stop it. We have a hugely talented cohort of elected Democrats including our own two Oregon senators and if, right now, they look as vulnerable as a lone man standing in front of a line of tanks, remember how that played out. Of course we weren’t ready. Our tanks are sidelined and rusty. We didn’t even think their tank gambit was legal, or constitutional. It isn’t. But they sent those tanks rumbling toward us anyway, and it’s up to us to stop them. Quit looking for a magical leader to turn this around: we don’t elect dictators on our side. But you, and I, and all our friends weeping inconsolably into their keyboards and waiting for some champion to ride in for us—we are the tanks. All we need to do is show up.

This rally was loosely “organized” by fiftyfifty.one, a deliberately decentralized peace movement devoted to amplifying grass roots resistance. Sign up for updates about actions. We’ve already gotten people in the streets in all fifty states in the middle of the winter and we’re growing by the day. Come spring, the broligarchy will be able to hear us from whatever hole they’ve barricaded themselves into to skim our personal information and eviscerate our government, the government by the people.

In fact, indulge me in a little fantasy: Musk’s band of nose-pickers is inside the Social Security Administration and has locked the doors against meddling opposition senators. What say we surround that building a hundred people deep with gray-haired old ladies that look like their great-grandmothers and we don’t let them out until they clean up the Cheeto crumbs in the basement and apologize? I am telling you. I know us. Our gray is the gray of steel. We’ve got nothing more important to do than form one hell of a mob.

“Why isn’t anyone stopping this outrageous bullshit? Where is everybody?” We’re right here. We’re everywhere. If you feel powerless, sign up for the next action, go outside with your peeps, take in a big breath of good air and find your hope in each other. I promise, you’ll feel better.

Think of us as roughage. Fiber. One little strand of plant-based carbohydrate doesn’t seem like a big deal, but put us together and we can get things moving again.

So be fibrous! Be indigestible! If we show up, we can shove all those fat shits right out the back door.