Bitter Grace

Judge Sarah Evans Barker, who swore in new citizens in Indiana shortly after election day "concluded, that day, by telling the sixty-eight new Americans:

"I welcome you today to your new life as citizens of the United States, and remind you in the clearest words I know to say to you: You are welcome here! You are welcome here! Now it is up to you to assume the important responsibilities of citizenship, which means to join the struggle to make this country as good and kind and just and welcoming as you imagined and hoped and perhaps prayed that it would be when you first embarked on your journey to become a citizen. I say again, you are welcome here. Don’t ever forget that, and if anyone ever challenges you on that, you tell them Judge Barker said so on this day you became a citizen."

- Alex Kotlowitz, "A Federal Judge Has a Message for Naturalized Citizens (and Trump)," The New Yorker, December 7, 2016.

"And tax collectors also came [to John the Baptist] to be baptized, and they said to him, “Teacher, what should we do?” And he said to them, `Collect no more than what you are ordered to.' And those who served in the army were also asking him, saying, “What should we also do?' And he said to them, `Extort from no one, and do not blackmail anyone, and be content with your pay.'”
- Luke 3: 12-14

By which I mean, we can live resistance and live the remaking of our US society as we go about our everyday lives, how we go about our daily work. It is not everything-- nothing is-- but it is a very important something.

And in fact we are in the process of making US society by how we live, whether we like it or not.

I'm grateful to the glorious and beloved smart_ted for knowledge of the New Yorker story.