Peace, love, resistance.

In 2016 the morning after the election I went to work early.

Looking back at my camera roll from that day, here’s Batman, with a reminder.

I think I got that from Twitter. Or maybe it was tumblr.

It’s the kind of educational message that’s necessary. Civic education, even by Batman, is important. We have to learn how to be good citizens. It is hard work to have a society worth living in.

My office was warm. Lots of wood. I don’t have any pictures of the overall layout, but I do have a photo of the built-in shelves. Or, I have pictures of the shelves with toy robots on them.

That morning folks trickled into the office. Many tired from a long night following election news. I remember one of my fellow web pros coming in sad, and one of the app guys came in too. We talked about what it would mean with Trump as President.

We talked about how he would be terrible. We talked about the dangers of him. I didn’t sugarcoat my opinions. One of my co-workers worried about being able to travel freely–she had family in Iran and went there annually, and her folks would visit from there sometimes too.

I said that I thought it looked pretty bad for freedom. I talked about Brexit. I talked about having lived in the Philippines as a kid, under Marcos. It was brief, and I was an American, but I felt what it meant to have leaders who lied to you. I talked about how it felt to live somewhere where you fear to speak your mind and tell the truth. It felt like an emergency.

It was sobering talk. It was not happy. But it was necessary. There were tears. There was disappointment.

I think I put “Peace, love, resistance” into my Twitter bio at the time. A trivial kind of gesture, but it was a kind of affirmation.

And we would find out in January that it was an emergency. Things did get worse. People were harmed.

But the US harming people is nothing new. We have done a lot of harm to people here. But alongside that, there have always been people fighting and striving to do right, to do good, to lean into making the United States the best place it can be.

And we can choose do that, or we can choose to give up.

To anyone reading this today, I tell you: do not give up. Do not let the bastards grind you down. Be indigestible. We must speak the truth. We must do right by our fellow citizens. We must do right by the whole world.

Here in California, we were partly insulated by our history. We’d had so much Republican leadership that sucked, California has been reliable Democratic for a long time. We had Senator Richard Nixon and Governor Ronald Reagan. Both of those men made the planet worse during their presidencies. And we’ve not elected a Republican Senator for California since 1992. Our last Republican Governor was in 2003: Schwarzenegger, an anomaly after the recall of Gray Davis.

In 2016, our Governor was Jerry Brown. His State of the State Address from January of 2017 was moving. There’s video. Here’s a passage:

But this morning it’s hard for me to keep my thoughts just on California. The recent election and Inauguration of a new President have shown deep divisions across America.

While no one knows what the new leaders will actually do, there are signs that are disturbing. We have seen the bald assertion of “alternative facts” — whatever those are — we’ve heard the blatant attacks on science. Familiar signposts of our democracy — truth, civility, working together — have been obscured or even swept aside.

But on Saturday we saw something else — in cities across the country, we witnessed a vast and inspiring fervor that is stirring in the land. Democracy doesn’t come from the top; it starts at the bottom — and it spreads in the hearts of the people. And in the hearts of Americans, our core principles are as strong as ever!

So as we reflect on the state of our state, we should do so in the much broader context of our country and the challenges it faces. We must prepare for very uncertain times and reaffirm the basic principles that have made California the Great Exception that it is.

First, in California, immigrants are an integral part of who we are and what we’ve become. They have helped create the wealth and dynamism of this state from the very beginning!

I recognize that under the Constitution, Federal Law is supreme and that Washington determines immigration policy. But as a state we can and we have played an important role. California has enacted several protective measures for the undocumented: the Trust Act, driver’s licenses, basic employment rights and non-discriminatory access to higher education. This is what made the DREAMers, and you made it happen!

We may be called upon to defend those laws and defend them we will. And let me be clear: we will defend everybody — every man, woman and child — who’s come here for a better life and has contributed to the well-being of our state.

Despite the bad news, I am keeping hope. I will continue to have peace and love in my heart. And I will resist badness wherever I find it. I hope you will too.

Peace, love, resistance.