For hours, joyously and with determination, we’d been out in the cold dancing, chanting, shouting, and marching to say enough is enough, TrumpPence #OutNow.

After dark, en masse, we entered the subway at Herald Square and squeezed into a subway car to to go uptown to Trump Tower, where we’d meet up with a contingent from Harlem and raise the giant #OUTNOW letters. Refusing to be silent, still full of defiant exuberance, we continued chanting on the train. TrumpPence Out Now!

Wherever people on that train were coming from, wherever they were going, they encountered a force that could not make peace with the injustices of a fascist regime.

The man standing next to me said, “I hate Trump too, but you all can shut up on the subway.”

One of our crew spoke up. “When they let the kids out of concentration camps, we’ll shut up.”

Still disapproving, but flustered, the man said, “No one hates Trump more than I do.”

His declaration kept churning in my head. What should I have said to him? What would I have liked to ask him? “What do you hate about Trump? What are you doing to stop him?”

At around 3am, after so many imaginary conversations with him, the lightbulb went on.

At 3 am, in my head, I said to him…

It doesn’t matter how much you hate Donald Trump. What matters is how much you’ve accepted him.

Look, I get it. The media, the leadership of the Democratic Party, the #resistance, and even the Squad and Bernie Sanders – all telling you something or other about Trump and the danger he poses to this or that – also tell you to accept him, his regime, and everything they’ve done and what they will do if they remain in power. They tell you they’ll hold his feet to the fire while funding “border security” that actually expands Gestapo-terror and concentration camps. They tell you they’ll focus on the issues while fast-tracking fascist judges. They tell you impeachment is only about corruption, not about the cruelty or racism or crimes against humanity. They tell you to be outraged and then they tell you to swallow your outrage til next November.

None of them have told you this fascist trajectory is so categorically unacceptable that we must move heaven and earth to stop it.

But if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t care how much you hate Donald Trump. What has been the cost of your acceptance?

Hundreds who can no longer in their bones adjust to the injustices of this regime joined the #OutNow movement over the last 5 weeks. Humanity needs the rest of you who say you hate this, but we’re not waiting for you. Start catching up, because we’re going to keep making noise and disturbing the air, waking up and shaking up the millions who must become a third force to stop a fascist America. It’s our duty to NOT shut up.