The Resistance Is Here
"I know how you feel—because I've been there there too. On a bad day, and there are many bad days, our nation’s backslide from democracy into autocracy accelerates…Untrained, masked federal agents are running roughshod in our streets, terrorizing communities. Peaceful protesters have been killed. The government has been weaponized, and the Supreme Court feels stacked…It’s almost impossible to keep up; even harder to know what to do.”
So begins Skye Perryman’s sobering but hopeful and practical new book, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times. Though this handbook for hard times is elevated by a we’re-all-in-it-together spirit, Perryman, an attorney and president and CEO of Democracy Forward, doesn’t sugarcoat what we’re all facing.
“We have to acknowledge that there is no cavalry coming to protect us,” she writes. “No knight in shining armor to save us from the situation we are in. It’s up to us. We are the people who decide what happens next.” And while daunting, she says “it can also be empowering to know how essential we are in the fight for freedom and our democracy.”
Perryman fervently believes that action is antidote. By “reclaiming our collective power,” and by using the “tools that ordinary people have used in extraordinary times before us,” she insists that together we can “fight for freedom today, build for a better tomorrow.”
The post The Resistance Is Here appeared first on Ms. Magazine.
14.8.2026. 12:40:59