Have you ever been in a fight before? I mean a real fist fight. Not a martial arts match, but the kind of fight where you rarely get a chance to strike a Bruce Lee pose or make a Bruce Lee noise. We’re not talking made-for-TV. Real-life fights are a mess, and after you’ve been in one, you’ll approach every other fight from that point forward very differently. For many of us, 2017 was a fist fight. Like many fist fights, I’m not even sure if we won or lost; I suspect we lost. I know we’re battered and bruised. We landed a good punch here or there and I know we’re still standing, but if this is a win, I’d hate to see what losing feels like.

For many of us, 2017 was a fist fight. We’re battered and bruised.

More people were killed by police this year than last year, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Justice Department are doing everything they can to avoid holding police accountable. Muslims and immigrants and indigenous Americans have been railroaded over and over again. People are starving to death in Yemen. Africans are being bought, sold, and murdered in Libya. Rich people just got huge tax cuts, while most Americans can’t afford health care or college tuition. And politicians who claim to be progressive still seem like they’re embarrassed to actually act like it. Then there are the more concrete losses, and we lost a lot. The sudden heart attack, coma, and death of 27-year-old Erica Garner, a mother and anti-police brutality activist, somehow made sense as we closed 2017. Her death was a horrible cap to an unimaginably hard year. Erica was my friend. I trusted her. She was as honest and authentic of a person as you’ll ever encounter on this earth. She spoke of truth to power as a daily discipline and refused to suffer fools gladly. It’s in the shadows of her untimely death that I look forward into 2018, trying to imagine what’s ahead. It might be better to start with what is not going to happen in 2018. Donald Trump is not going to be impeached. Period. First and foremost, no matter what Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation finds, Republicans will continue to control Congress at least until January 2019. Between now and then, even if Democrats have landslide victories in the midterm elections, the current Republicans in Congress will not impeach Trump. They are in too deep with him; they’ve hitched their wagons to his legacy and leadership. Even if the Mueller investigation charges someone in Trump’s inner circle with obstruction of justice or some crime related to collusion with an foreign government, Trump would never resign under any circumstances. All of this to say that 2018 will be another year with Trump in office, and expecting otherwise is futile.

After you get your ass handed to you, you can either go back with the same game plan and keep losing, or you can rethink everything, regroup, and go back to the fight.