Just Do Something January
in which I discover the joys of action instead of doomscrolling
I don’t think it’s a secret that I hate January. I cannot overstate my hatred. I hate it so much. February seems marginally more bearable and more interesting. It’s shorter, it's Black History Month, and it has Valentine’s Day, which I have always loved regardless of relationship status. But January, man. It just has… nothing. It’s a blank space where a month should be. It seems like a cruel cosmic joke that in the Northern Hemisphere we are forced annually to begin the new year in the darkest, coldest, most depressing, most blah month.
And this January, especially. This terrible, endless, frigid, most awful January in this dumpster fire of a dying country. This January in which we are forced to watch as ICE unleashes terror on the Twin Cities and murders American citizens in broad daylight and then our leaders go on TV and blatantly lie about what we all saw with our own eyes. This January with the cold snap and the big storm and the far-below-freezing-for-weeks weather.
Don’t get me wrong. Even this most unholy of months also contained profound joys. Even January contains multitudes.
I rang in the new year with my mom at Epcot, where I took her to her first Silent Disco. I went to Maple Fest at the Nature Center with Grace and learned about the maple syrup making process. My friends and I got together on a Sunday afternoon to make 2026 bingo cards. I got two snow days in a row this past week, on a Monday and Tuesday of all days, and that was an absolute treat. I baked bread and cooked curry lentil soup (shoutout to Emily for that recipe), and I finally watched Heated Rivalry. Twice. Absolutely bless those adorable silly geese. Hollanov forever.
I spent MLK weekend in Florida with my wonderful boyfriend (oh yeah, I have one of those now!) and discovered that Orlando, as a city, is actually very beautiful— it’s full of leafy neighborhoods and botanical gardens and gorgeous parks in which peacocks roam freely and river otters swim in the lakes amongst floating plants.
And something else really good happened, too. I finally stopped doomscrolling, got off my phone, and started taking action.
I have really bad static inertia. I must have the exact variety of brain that our evil tech overlords had in mind when they designed apps like Instagram. I can scroll like no one else can. If scrolling were an Olympic sport, I’d get the bronze medal, at least. I was consuming horrific content at a horrific rate. Renée Good. Alex Pretti. Shot after shot after shot. Poor sweet five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos kidnapped by ICE to Texas. Footage of the massive protests last Friday in Minneapolis, happy-crying watching the good people of that cold cold city show up en masse on the right side of history. But it was too much. Too much. I was posting and posting and not doing anything. Enough was enough.
So I started doing things.
I’m a millennial, which means, among other things, that making me make a phone call is the worst thing you can do to me. I am aware that right-wingers call their members of congress at a staggering rate, much more often than people on the left, and I am aware that this is a problem, but I had been putting off this very easy action because, again, I Hate Phone Calls. But, reader, I finally did it. I picked up 5 Calls and called my Republican senators and told them what I thought. And then I did it again the next day. And the next day. And guess what? On Thursday the 29th, Kentucky senator Rand Paul voted against the bill that would increase ICE’s budget to $75 billion over the next four years. He voted against it for reasons that are not mine, but still. A no is a no.
I’ve been to two protests in downtown Cincinnati this month, one just after Renée Good’s murder and one last night. Both times, I expected a small group, and both times, a huge crowd greeted me, a crowd that only grew as we started marching through the city, chanting and singing and calling for justice. It felt electric, energizing, so good to be out there in community marching. Protests are only one small symbolic piece of a much larger puzzle, but still, it’s action. It’s not sitting in my house hemming and hawing about whether to start prepping or get plans in place to move abroad or spiraling into general doom. It’s being outside, it’s being together, it’s showing up.
My friend KG in Minneapolis—who is heavily involved with the resistance there—sent me a link to a webinar hosted by Showing Up for Racial Justice on Tuesday. The session was focused on action steps ordinary people can take, inspired by lessons from Minneapolis. I attended, and took notes, and got ideas like joining a Signal group, inviting people in by hosting a potluck, and sharing information about how ICE operates and how to respond.
One of the most meaningful moments of my teaching career happened yesterday. One of my coworkers led a group of students in saying the rosary while walking around the school, in solidarity with the nationwide General Strike. Teachers can’t exactly strike or talk about our political opinions, but there is one thing we can do at a religious school: pray. It was optional; we didn’t tell any of the students that they had to join us. We just said we had to speak out against the state-sanctioned violence that directly counters all the teachings of the Church on respect for life. Neither of us really expected any students to join, but there was a big group. They had organized amongst themselves, distributing rosaries and making a plan to walk. We circled the building, cycling through the Decades and the Sorrowful Mysteries and the Glory Be. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. It was a risky move in our environment. We’ll see what consequences await. But action should involve risk. If it doesn’t, it isn’t action.
Are these actions having any impact, at least beyond my immediate community? No. Probably not. But it is in your immediate circle that you can have an effect, anyway. I’m not so naïve or self-aggrandizing to think that my measly little individual calls to my senators or our one small prayerful walk at one small school on the edge of the Ohio River can possibly make a difference on a national scale. But that isn’t the point of individual action. No one can change the tide. But everyone together, having hard conversations, taking small risks, can begin to cause a shift. We only win by organizing. We only win by working together. I believe that that shift is not only possible, but already happening.
People I’ve never seen be political before are speaking up on social media and in conversations against the state-sanctioned terror of ICE. The protests in Minneapolis last week were some of the most impressive I’ve ever seen. Ordinary people are organizing and communicating and educating each other and showing up in impressive and creative ways. We’re learning from other countries, from history, from from each other. It’s happening, it’s happening, and I have to hold onto it’s happening to remain any kind of sane.
There is so much more that all of us can do. But it’s a good start to just do something. Get off your phone. Quit doomscrolling. Instagram wants to rage bait you and keep you engaged. I would know—I’m among the most easily rage-bait-able social media users in history. But I’m telling you, it feels so good to just pick something and do it. You don’t know what else it will lead to. What one little step forward will cause which dominoes to fall.
Stay informed, but stay sane, too. Dance. Learn. Explore. March. Scream. Go for a walk. Fall in love. Write a poem. Read a book. Otherwise, what kind of world are we fighting for?
