Today, I made potato soup. It’s a favorite comfort food of mine, and the weather today was perfect for it. Earlier today, a snow squall blew up from nowhere, and for about 30 minutes, it looked like blizzard conditions outside my window.

But then the snow cleared, and the sky grew bright and cold. I chopped onions and thought about a woman a thousand miles away who won’t be sharing dinner with her family tonight. A woman who had just dropped her kid off to school, and with her dog in the backseat, was shot and killed by an ICE agent.

I thought about why she was killed. About the circumstances that set this action into motion. About the agent’s recorded words to her after he pulled the trigger. About how it wasn’t enough that she was turning away, about how he had to have the last word and he said it with violence and a gun.

I thought about how this woman is being vilified now to make her death more palatable to a base that was fine with death and inhumane treatment as long as it happened to the Other and not to them. Oh, she was married to another woman? Then that’s okay. She wasn’t one of us.

But she was one of us. As was the woman who was shot in her bed during a botched police raid, and the man shot at a traffic stop for telling the officer he had a registered firearm, or the man who said, “I can’t breathe” as the life was crushed out of him.

I chopped onions and and thought about so many people whose stories I don’t know because being a white woman I was raised on a different narrative. My thoughts were messy and chaotic because everything is messy and chaotic right now. It’s as though every bit of news is designed now to make you believe everything is hopeless and you’re going to die–public health and safety is crumbling, and our civil rights are eroding. The Constitution has been removed from the government website and our checks and balances are flagrantly ignored. Climate change statistics and historical documents are being scrubbed even as the White House has been gutted for a vanity project. Armed, masked men are kidnapping people off the streets and see nothing wrong with killing a protester.

The message is loud and clear. Stay home, or you’re next. Give up. We’ve won. We have no use for anything but “us” and our definition of “us” becomes more narrowly defined every day.

I confess there are days when this message works on me. When I make soup, and it isn’t the onions that make me cry. Then I look at my family, my friends, my community and I think, “You can’t make me give up on them.”

And so I make soup. Walk the dogs. Meet with my crit group and talk about writing projects. Read books that comfort me. Watch movies with my family. I also look around me and ask myself what is something I can do this week for someone else to make their lives better? Maybe it’s donating to a food pantry. Helping a friend financially or with my time. Maybe it’s reporting ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s gofundme for legal expenses because a) the government is paying them and b) raising money for a possible murder defense is against gofundme’s TOS. Perhaps I send some money to Second Harvest because Minnesota’s SNAP program funding has been cut off. I’ll take that money I would have spent on a streaming platform that has become another government mouthpiece and donate to a victim’s gofundme, or help a stranger online meet their rent or medical bills.

It’s not much. I know that. But it’s what I can do. Because all these little things are seeds of hope, and hope IS resistance too.