I have no idea how big the march I was in was. That’s the thing about being in a big march. You’re just another corpuscle rolling and jostling down the stream and you don’t know exactly where in the body you are.

“Corpuscle” is Latin for small body, something I have one of. From my vantage point, armpit high in a sea of raised signs, the extent of the sea is hard to gauge. I don’t mind the view. I’m used to it. I don’t need to see what’s coming. I can see who I’m with. And boy, are we ever together.

This march in downtown Portland, Oregon was one of hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) across the country; in fact, there were at least seven in our own area, assembling at malls, post offices, parks. It’s the new model: rather than herding everyone into central locations, the protest is broad and diffuse and local, encouraging anyone interested to show up, even those made nervous by huge crowds. You want to make yourself heard? There’s a neighborhood rally near you. There’s more opportunity for participation, and less likelihood any one event will be targeted by shock troops or inexplicably proud boys.

The signs said it all. There was so much to protest. In a way, my favorite was the piece of cardboard upon which was scrawled: Where do I even start? Because what certain citizens like to call “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—an apparently baffling condition in which we deplore anything related to Trump—is, in fact, a stone-cold sober and clear-headed assessment that every single thing the man does, proclaims, touches, steals, or lies about is dead wrong. Every thing. Where do we even start?

My habit is to start with my overriding concern: climate change. And here we are led by a man determined to tank our future in favor of doubling down on the fuels and fallacies of the past. But this degree of greed and myopia was predictable with this crew. What horrified me almost more than any other fool thing that is being done in our name was the staged ambush of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office when, in a matter of minutes, one president redrew the entire world order and signed us on to the axis of murder, invasion, autocracy, oligarchy. Sold out our tattered ideals of liberty and justice for all, and blithely traded them for power and pelf for the few.

And the horrors just kept on coming. Now we haul people off the streets and pack them off to death prisons with no due process. Now we cut funding for institutions with the temerity to strive for inclusion. Now we punish free speech, now we cut the press off at the knees. Now we quest for the sovereign territory of others. Now we wink at domestic terrorism if it’s in the service of white supremacy. Where do we even start?

Marching is the antidote to feeling alone, helpless, and utterly bewildered that anyone, anywhere, has pledged allegiance to the most loathsome creature our nation has ever hawked up and spit out. It’s not hard to find allies in Portland. But we’re showing up to be counted, everywhere. And it’s not performative.

Because we are the leaders we’ve been waiting for. There is no one we can elect to shovel us out of this shithole, and nothing anyone in office can do, if we don’t back them up.

So be a corpuscle! Join the big stream. We won’t know where in the body we are, but we’ll all be together. We start at the heart and we will return to the heart.