When all that remains is what we can control—please vote, please show up for your neighbors.

I feel I have expressed this sentiment countless times in recent months. What weighs on me constantly is the growing callousness, the cruelty of privilege, and the cruelty of indifference.

So many American families are one crisis away from losing everything—their homes, their next meal, any foothold they have. SNAP benefits have been cut. Food banks are at capacity. 42 million people who rely on food assistance face an impossible choice, while 6.7 million women and children on WIC wait to see if emergency funding will come through.

Meanwhile, the East Wing of the People's House—our White House—has been demolished to make way for a lavish, gold-gilt ballroom funded by private donors.

The symbolism could not be clearer: millions go hungry while those in power build monuments to excess.

I think about the collective bystander effect we're experiencing—the belief that someone else, some institution, some constitutional safeguard will step in. But those safeguards are being quietly dismantled while we wait.

I don't have the answers to our collective apathy. Like many of you, I feel hopeless at times—like I'm failing to do enough.

I keep trying to focus on what I can control: running for office to care for my community and my neighbors, to bring grace, compassion, and common sense at least to our immediate community and work up from there. I donate blood, food, and clothes whenever I can, and I have not abandoned my voice—on the contrary, I speak up more frequently, and I show up whenever I am invited.

It's frustrating, I know. You're fighting corporate algorithms that purposefully prevent your message from being heard on social media, even (or especially) when that message is solely asking for more empathy, or for the respect of our constitutional guardrails. You're fighting evermore entrenched and sophisticated interest groups whose massive financial support—contingent on blind allegiance—drowns out or gaslights legitimate voices of dissent and concern.

So I remind myself to continue to do the things I can control, and all that remains:

Vote. Support your neighbors, friends, and families as best as you can. And do not stop speaking up.