The People Still Holding the Line

In a time of fear and fatigue, courage is quieter—but strength is everywhere.

(📷: No Kings protest—El Paso, Texas)

The cameras never stay on the people holding steady. They pan toward the chaos–the shouting, the arrests, the blinding lights of another “breaking news” alert. The headlines fixate on demolition: the East Wing of the White House, gutted, and the rising cost of Trump’s Mar-A-Lago-style ballroom now pushing $300 million. While the powerful double down on fear and their rich, gilded ballrooms, the rest of us keep showing up. Quietly. Stubbornly. Together.

Yes, it’s heartbreaking to watch the People’s House destroyed in this way. I keep thinking back to the times I walked those hallways, and crossed into the East Wing. Now it’s gone. Completely decimated. And it’s frankly, disgusting. Donald Trump is building a grotesque Saddam-Hussein-style ballroom inside the White House. I’ve seen those palaces firsthand and it’s the first image that came to mind, right alongside Putin’s marble-plated compounds when I saw the images of the demolition. While grocery bills climb during a government shutdown and the price of eggs remains high, all of it is a symbol of just how far the reality is from Trump’s campaign promises and rhetoric.

And yet, everywhere I go lately, I see it: resilience and strength.

Not in headlines or soundbites, but in the everyday people who are still holding this country together. A furloughed federal worker volunteering at a food bank while anxiously waiting for a paycheck. Or the woman I spoke with today, who has seen her immigrant friends taken and her community shattered. She still found a way to smile and say “They can’t deport love.” And in that moment, it felt like truth itself refused to be silenced.

When I stood outside the courthouse for the Comey hearing, I felt it again, that tension between despair and defiance. I felt strength covering the No Kings protests over this past weekend in Texas—the courage, the chants, and the hope in the crowd. But then, seeing the images of the White House crumbling into rubble brought that sadness back again. Because that building isn’t just brick and stone. It’s supposed to be the People’s House. And watching it fall, piece by piece, as I wrote earlier this week, feels like I’m watching the country we’ve built unravel in real time.

I felt it as I watched John Bolton, the third prominent Trump critic to face charges in recent weeks after James Comey and Letitia James, walk into the courtroom.
Someone I once worked beside, now branded a criminal for refusing to bend the knee. And I felt it again earlier this year, when the Supreme Court gave racial profiling its stamp of approval in Los Angeles, quietly lifting a lower-court order that had barred federal agents from stopping people based on race, ethnicity, or language. The ruling effectively has allowed immigration officers to make suspicion-free stops in the city, expanding federal power at the expense of civil rights. Many of us continue to watch in horror, because the signal couldn’t be clearer: the rule of law is being rewritten in real time.

But we didn’t break. And we won’t. We may not have billions of dollars in money or marble ballrooms, but we have presence. And presence is power. You don’t need a platform to make a stand. Sometimes all you need is to be there, to stand next to someone, to lock eyes, to say with your very being: You’re not alone.

That’s what courage looks like right now. Not viral. Not glamorous. But real.

It’s what the people in every city and small town are doing when they step out of their doors and refuse to be silent. Authoritarians thrive on exhaustion. They want you to tune out and believe it’s all inevitable. But every person who steps forward—at a rally, at the polls, or in a classroom, continuing to teach in a moment when professors and education itself are being targeted, proves it’s not.

Hope isn’t denial. It’s defiance. It’s the stubborn belief that doing what’s right still matters, even when it doesn’t seem to change the outcome. Hope is a volunteer handing out water bottles to protestors on a hot day. It’s the federal employee logging back into a broken system because they still believe in serving, even when they’re not being paid. It’s the journalist asking one more question when the room falls silent. It’s the poll worker still willing to show up on Election Day, even in the face of potential threats, and take part in the pinnacle of who we are. Hope is all of these actions. Every time someone refuses to normalize the unacceptable, democracy exhales, just a little.

So, yes, I’m angry, frustrated, and stressed. But beneath the anger is something more substantial: belief. Belief in the people who keep this country afloat when its leaders fail it. Belief in the quiet, relentless goodness that power can’t buy or bulldoze.

Every era of darkness depends on the same thing: people giving up. But we’re not giving up. 7 million people marched last Saturday, October 18th. We’re still here. Still standing. Still holding the line. And if you’re reading this, you are too.

See you soon,

Olivia