This hateful regime wants to exhaust us and convince us that victory will be theirs. We have the individual and collective power to prove them wrong.

It’s my belief based on many times in our history when the reality was bleak and the light was hard to find. But the Confederacy did lose, slavery was abolished, Hitler and the thousand-year-Reich did die by suicide in a bunker, Joseph McCarthy’s attack on Americans as communists ended with shame and his death from alcoholism at 48, John Lewis did not give up the dream of civil rights after a bloody beating on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Throughout our 249-year-old democratic project, Americans have forged ahead and refused to accept that the promise of freedom and justice cannot be realized and must be abandoned.

All this gives me hope. All this reminds me not to get overwhelmed by the daily madness. It doesn’t mean ignoring the tragedies and the ongoing nightmare. Rather it gives me hope that the fight is worth it and we can’t allow ourselves to indulge in the feeling that our democracy is finished.

Part of our task right now is to recognize that hope is a discipline, a way of grasping what’s at stake. This requires looking to the past and envisioning the future to strengthen our capacity to manage the present. Some days that task will be harder than others, but I beseech you to build that muscle and hold tightly to hope.