As of today the Electoral College has voted, and apart from a few faithless electors (the most since 1872, actually) they all did what everyone expected… and arguably not what they should have done, at least according to some dude named Alexander Hamilton.

It’s been about a month and a half of nonstop posting and news coverage of every heinous Cabinet pick, each stupid distraction, all the international disgraces, and the shredding of any dignity or admirable conduct once associated with the transition of a new administration. I hope you enjoyed all those stimulating and enraging posts filling up your feed! Because the time for handwringing is now over.

If you have time to post about some wretched thing PE Trump has just done, said, or tweeted, then you have time to do something to fight him. Don’t trot out that old excuse, “I’m raising awareness.” Well, you’re not needed for that; that job is, to put it mildly, heavily over-subscribed. If you stopped posting today, in five minutes a thousand other people who never read my blog will do it for you. The country doesn’t need more awareness. We need action. We need you, the person reading this post, to be actively involved, in action. Actionably and actionatedly.

What form should your action take? If you’re like me, the temptation is to bounce from one outrage to the next, squandering your passion and energy on an unfocused list of topics, each more anxiety-inducing than the last. Don’t do that. First, get hip to a couple of critical truths:

Don’t expect progressives to accomplish anything for at least the next two years.

American government is better at preventing things than doing things.

Believe it or not, both of these are actually good news for us. Because the GOP controls the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, we do not have to waste time trying to advance a progressive agenda. We won’t be able to. If the legislative and executive branches were divided, it’d be a different story. But with Republicans controlling the entire apparatus, we can’t offer participation, only capitulation. So right there, we’ve saved a lot of headaches and energy trying to pretend that we can do something meaningful. For the moment, we can’t. Don’t waste your precious energy chasing that phantom.

That leads to the second point: in Congress, real power lies only partially in what you can get done; it’s just as potent stopping things from getting done. Our friends in the Tea Party did this excellently. They learned where the pressure points were, and despite being a small minority of their party’s constituency, managed to crush most of the potential in Obama’s administration. We owe a debt of gratitude to our Tea Party friends for their stellar example. Now it’s our turn. Using their techniques and learning from their experience, we must frustrate, impede, block and sabotage every initiative from the new Trump administration.

So that’s the form my own personal action will now take. If you don’t know what to do, I think you should:

Get progressives installed at every possible level of government: local, municipal, county, and state. Resist EVERY SINGLE THING the new Trump administration wants to accomplish.

I see these as an overall strategy: two broad goals, both essential. If we focus only on one or only the other, we’ll either be unprepared and lose in 2018 or we’ll have a Herculean amount of damage to undo if we win. So we have to do both at the same time.

For now I’m calling this two-pronged strategy “Act Locally/Resist Nationally.” I briefly considered calling it “Resist Endlessly Nationally/Act Locally” which would make the acronym RENAL. But kidney-related references aren’t exciting so for now it’s ALRN. Maybe “Nationally Always Resist/Locally Yes!” which would spell NARLY! Also not great.

For the “Act Locally” part, Bernie himself said it well:

We need to start engaging at the local and state level in an unprecedented way. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers helped us make political history during the last year. These are people deeply concerned about the future of our country and their own communities. Now we need many of them to start running for school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures and governorships. State and local governments make enormously important decisions and we cannot allow right-wing Republicans to increasingly control them. I hope very much that many of you listening tonight are prepared to engage at that level.

People are already taking Bernie’s advice. Using me as just one example, I have:

These people above are just the beginning. We need a progressive wave of candidates and public servants to swamp the bilgewater-soaked decks of a Trump administration (that may be my most tortured metaphor ever.) Tl;dr is we need a lot more people just like them, but we’re off to a terrific start.

For “Resist Nationally” I’ve found a terrific document that you should read right now:

Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda at http://bit.ly.indivisibleguide

So far this is the best thing I’ve found. The authors are former Congressional staffers, so they know both the mechanics of constituent engagement and the motivations of the lawmakers. They make crystal clear what to do and very importantly, what not to waste time doing because it won’t make a difference. I’m going to share the link to the guide at least once a week for the foreseeable future because I think it’s that critical. Read it and share the link (http://bit.ly/indivisibleguide) with everyone you know. It tells you what to do for maximum impact, and how to do it.

Start reading! Start doing! And let me know how it’s going.