You were told that the hour was late and the damage was done. That power had moved somewhere you could not reach it, into rooms where decisions get made by people who don’t care to know your name.
You were told, as every generation before you has been told, to be patient, to be realistic, to wait for someone better positioned to act on your behalf.
You did not wait. You walked out of your houses and stood out in the cold with strangers and said, with your bodies, that this country still belongs to its people.
That is not a small thing: Every freedom any of us holds was taken, not granted, by ordinary people who decided they would no longer consent to an arrangement someone else had designed for them. The women who lost the vote in Colorado in 1877 and came back to win it in 1893. The sharecropper thrown off her land for trying to register, who went back to that courthouse and registered anyway. The young man who packed a toothbrush because he expected jail and walked across that bridge in Selma anyway.
None of them had any assurances they would succeed. Neither did you.
You acted because it was right.
And you were never promised it would work. Some of you were arrested. Some of you were gassed. Some of you lost work and friendships and sleep, and went back out the following weekend with children at home and fear in your chest.
You bore it all without bitterness and without turning cruel, which is hard.
What you have built cannot be taken from you tomorrow. Not by a count. Not by a court. Not by a man. You have remembered how a free people behave, and people who remember that do not easily forget it again.
Tomorrow, we finish what we started. Go and vote. Take someone with you who was not going to go: The neighbor who says it makes no difference, the coworker who has given up, the person who needs a ride and will never ask. Stand in whatever line you must stand in, and don’t leave that line until the task is done.
Do it with your head up, because you’ve earned the right to hold it high for the rest of your life.
And know this, whatever the night brings: Nothing we have done together is contingent on the outcome. The courage was real when it was given. It will still be real on Wednesday, and we will need it then too, because this work does not end when the election is over.
I have been proud of very little in my life the way I am proud of you.
Go finish it, and don’t forget to be brave.
In solidarity,
Carlos Álvarez-Aranyos
Founder, American Opposition
