Sounds naive, but I am deadly serious about this: in the Trump era, kindness is a form of protest.
A practical, simple, and important thing we can all do to protest trumphalism is to act in opposition to it by embodying a quality that is so strikingly absent in the new president: kindness. There are many reasons I recommend kindness beyond the platitudes you may have heard in grammar school. Kindness can be a personal counteroffensive to trumphalist toxicity. When he projects hate, we should respond powerfully and politically, but if we absorb that hate and project it back into the world, we could become vessels of ire.
We don't owe Trump any kindness, of course. But our communities will be better for it. And importantly, a kindness counteroffensive can be a defense against having our personal worlds distorted. It can be a way to carve out space to maintain the writing, teaching, and public engagement we did before Trump came along. So that what we do is not driven by the latest missive, but instead by our own priorities.
By the way, kindness is not weakness. Its very uncoolness makes it an oppositional identity. Kindness has power -- it has a palpable effect on other people.
So if you wonder, in despair, what on earth we should do to weather the coming onslaught, I have one small suggestion: practice kindness as protest.
