Authenticity: A Good Sign
Post 02; origin stories
Maria thanked me, because I was carrying my sign.
We two live in this same little group of apartment buildings, and generally wave hello while walking our dogs, from a polite distance, which is on me, because my dog is a jerk. On this occasion, I could give her dog a pat and tell him how good he is, and Maria gestured at my sign and said, “Thank you for doing this.”
What I was doing was, heading to the corner a half mile down the hill, where a merry band of protesters holds a vigil during Tuesday rush hours. We wave our signs and share flyers, and cheer when cars going by honk their horns for us. It’s little enough, what we do. I thanked Maria, in turn, for appreciating; and she wanted to express a little more.
Her job is stressful and starts early in the day. She is well aware of How Truly Bad Things Are and needs to blot it out. Come home from work and watch silly entertainments. Because things are too upsetting to think about. And people don’t think they can do anything, and don’t know what to do, and don’t want to get so upset that they cannot do the things they’re doing to survive the day to day.
“You know,” I said slowly, wrapping my head around this, “our Rep in Congress is really great. She’s been doing all kinds of things to fight back, and I’ve called her office just to thank her staffers, and ask them to please thank the Congresswoman, and say that she has our support. This is something that feels really good to do, it’s a positive and not a negative, not hopeless or frustrating.”
Maria’s mood brightened, she smiled, she hadn’t thought of that. I was also happy if something I said can be helpful, and I believed it was. With that, I continued down the hill to the weekly vigil that, by its very nature, can make us wonder whether we’re doing anything helpful. There’s nothing quite like walking back uphill through the city with a sign, right past somebody who’s bedding down for the evening on the sidewalk, when it’s not in the plan to pull out a dollar for them because the plan is to save democracy.
RESIST WITH US
At one end of a scale, there’s picket lines that have specific demands. At another end, loosely organized protests in danger of looking idiosyncratic and diffuse. But when you keep up week after week, it’s not diffuse. We can rely upon the vigil. No matter how long the grievance list, no matter how many folks in California’s San Francisco Bay Area already know about the digital coup and the ICE quotas and the presidential grifting, we are here to say that this is not normal and must be stopped.
In the post that introduced my Substack, I promised to show up sharing “actions that I authentically believe in,” and yes, invoking my scientist cred just to make the point that we have a work front where friends and colleagues can help expand the audience, without being out of sync with our employers.
I will get there, especially in the next two planned posts. Before I get to stand up for science, though, I want to write this “part 2” for origin stories to express what “authentic” means to me, and why it matters.
The photos in this post are my snapshots of the neighborhood vigil thing. Signs say “PROTECT THE RULE OF LAW,” “IMPEACH TRUMP/ PROSECUTE MUSK,” “DON’T TRASH DIVERSITY – CHERISH IT!” Signs say “STOP FUNDING GENOCIDE,” “GRIFTER-IN-CHIEF,” “DEMOCRACY OR FASCISM: OUR CHOICE.” “ALT-RIGHT-DELETE: EQUALITY NOW.” “HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE.” And many more. Signs for the latest news. Signs for a person’s core beliefs.
The two most important signs say, “RESIST WITH US,” and, “BE AS COURAGEOUS AS YOU CAN.”
I need to pull quotes from two other writers for this essay, and encourage you to follow their work too. One is Mike Brock. In a post called “What You Should Do,” Mike says:
“What should we do?” is a question people often direct at me, in response to my characterization of the moral horrors we see playing out every day. Well, allow me to undertake the challenge of coming up with something like an answer.
The only resistance worth a damn is the one where you stop calculating the odds and start living your truth without reservation. What separates the merely clever from the genuinely courageous isn't tactical brilliance but moral clarity—the willingness to act as if your conscience matters more than your comfort. The irony, which our enemies will never grasp, is that this apparent recklessness creates the most robust safety net imaginable. While they isolate themselves in gilded bunkers of power, we forge bonds of mutual aid that no authority can sever.
I’m here to tell you that I believe this, Whole, Heartedly.
I was quitting my job right around the onset of Trump 2.0.
I quit my job early in Trump 1.0, too, which was good practice and is a story to tell another time, being mentioned in passing since it shows that this wasn’t my maiden voyage into consequential decisions. Now, my whole career since 1996 had been in the employ of National Laboratory facilities funded by the U. S. Dept. of Energy. I wasn’t a Fed, but I worked on Federal property with government owned computers. We know that we have a responsibility not to go rogue or show up our companies in a bad light. I have an affiliation now with responsibilities to assist DOE projects, and an obligation to respect it. Keeping our politics to our personal environments was expected and warranted.
But here we all were in the first week of February 2025, aghast at how rapidly the government was being taken apart. The wrecking balls of 2017 were nothing in comparison. What to do and what to say? How to do the least harm, how to hold the line? We should play by the rules against this? That quaint metric we had for “going rogue,” is it even remotely comparable to this?
Knowing I would be leaving, admittedly, freed me up some but I still have bills to pay. I had a decision to make. I would use LinkedIn, and my professional contacts, to learn the truth, share the truth, and see to it that I can look in the mirror ten years from now and know that I never lied to myself.
“The only resistance worth a damn is the one where you stop calculating the odds and start living your truth without reservation,” Brock says.
Could I? Well, there’s a thing that really helped. There’s a colleague we have in the Agencies. They’re members of a vulnerable protected class. They’re a Fed. They spoke out. They broadcasted the danger on their LinkedIn in no uncertain terms, to a much larger network than I had, while living a life that exposes them to considerable danger given the premises of Project 2025. And I said to myself, how dare I behave as if I’m more afraid than they seem to be.
The reward for seeking the truth and facts was immediate.
There may be a time when, for privacy’s and safety’s sake, we will have to cloak or close up our social media. But not now. My LinkedIn immediately lit up with like minded professionals in all walks of life, worldwide, sharing experiences, information about agencies, actions, lawsuits, trackers – every aspect of this struggle, really. Probably the most important part was to show that there IS a real, and worthy, struggle. SO many people who won’t take this coup, this grift, this institutionalized hatred, lying down.
Those professionals inspired me to share their stories too, because it’s being proven that resistance is actionable.
But I wasn’t putting things into my own words, not yet. It was more important to me to understand what’s under the hood of Project 2025. I hope to use this Substack to share some of that as well. That said, another interaction let me know of the pitfalls.
“I wish you’d stop posting about politics,” my old friend told me. They were stressed. They feared for their family. They needed not to be triggered when they went to see what their friends were doing on Facebook, they were sick of coming face to face with the horrors. They had reasons why any given thing wouldn’t help enough; to feel that the endgame was hopeless.
Understanding their concerns, welcoming them to mute me in their feed for as long as they needed to, and knowing better than to enter into any of the specific arguments, I had mainly this to say: “The solution is not for me to be inauthentic.”
As the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit has reminded us so many times, we cannot save everything, but we can save some things, and everything that can be saved is worth saving.
How To Stand Up
The signs that are borne at all of the vigils and protests speak to our diversity and our strength. My sign, of course, says: “STAND UP FOR SCIENCE.” Support for science is uncomplicated and actionable; but we are also a smaller constituency, despite the importance — this becomes clear when you see which things run the most outrage up the flagpoles. It’s super important to me to share those stories and it’s my hope that my readers will broaden the audience and impacts, too.
Here are the sneak previews:
Bookmark ProtectScienceAndInnovation.org, and plan 21-July for a Day of Action phoning Congress
Bookmark StandUpForScience.org, they’ve found more than a couple ways to make #GoodTrouble
And there will be more. Probably jump in for the next two posts at least.
At the planned time, the crowd disperses.
I walk back up the hill with my sign, hungry for dinner, feeling exposed, and fighting the survivor’s guilt and the imposter syndrome too (why is it that these two things can’t duke it out between them, and leave me alone?). Community-fueled energy drains away — for me it does, anyhow.
That’s a moment when all the doubting questions come back. Are things really this bad. The tariffs, the farm workers, the surveillance, the destructive governance, only 2% of our population gets it, are we exaggerating, are we wrong. There’s still gas, there’s still internet, there’s still eggs.
To recover from that moment, I’ll reread something like The Logic of Destruction, posted by Timothy Snyder.
You may have heard of Snyder, when it was reported that three of our country’s leading experts in the study of fascism left Yale for the University of Toronto this year.
I’m not currently embarking a persuasion campaign to convert the doubters, but if I were, The Logic of Destruction lays it all out in really short sentences. Rereading this piece quenches any gas-lighty crap that tried to worm its way into me.
And this piece, too, has more than a couple words on What We Should Do. If you voted Republican. If you are a Member of Congress. If you’re a Federal worker. (A part of the post that made me check its date – February 2nd. So much collapse was still to come, at that early moment!) If you’re the CEO of a company. If you work in state government. If you’re “a commentator.” All of them, in my opinion, things that can be done without compromising the things we do every day to survive.
Then Snyder says:
As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.
Among my colleagues, I found people who were doing things that I admire and I have aspired to join them.
That’s what I want for you, too. Quoting Brock again,
So what should you do? Stop asking that question as if there's a single answer that applies to everyone. Start asking instead: What does my most authentic self demand in this moment? What action would make me feel whole rather than diminished? What truth needs speaking that only I can articulate in my unique way?
Then do that thing. Not once, not as a performance, but consistently. Not with an eye toward results, but with a commitment to process. Not because it will necessarily "work," but because it's the only thing that will allow you to recognize yourself when this is all over.
I’m asking whether you can feel like Maria did at that moment I told about.
Call a Dem who represents us well, and thank them for having our back. Choose a few articles for your not yet fully like-minded colleagues to read. Do a little more than giving your family and students and pets and snarky-social-media-feed their loving care, because yes that matters, but you were going to do it anyway, without the part where democracy is getting its ribs broken.
Embrace curiosity, try to understand things properly, take risks, tell the truth.
