This morning both prognosticating groundhogs—“Phil” in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and “Jimmy” here in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin—predicted that it’s going to be a long winter.  But then many of us knew that already.

If we didn’t realize it on November 9, we surely did by January 20, when Donald Trump, after raising his right hand, flipped a rhetorical middle finger at the world, at the American political tradition, and at most of his fellow citizens. The shadow cast by the two weeks since betokens not just six more wintry weeks but four long dark and chilling years, and maybe more.

Each of us, or at least the half of the country that didn’t seek and doesn’t welcome this bizarre new season, has choices to make about how to contend with it. The question isn’t whether to become civically engaged, but how. The retirement-bound journalist Roger Simon, in an angry valedictory on Politico.com yesterday, cited Henry David Thoreau’s assertion that “any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one … ” in framing that choice. “You are a majority of one,” Simon wrote. “You have a duty to act like it. You have a duty to do something to preserve democracy. Something nonviolent, I hope, but something.” 

As of today, this blog is my modest “something.” Non-violent, to be sure (apart from accidental violence to the English language and good prose style, which I’ll try to keep to a minimum). But also, I hasten to add, disavowing any notion that I am “more right than my neighbors." As for how truly “left” it is: that's a judgment I'll leave to others.

Of course thinking and writing are no substitutes for action. If there’s a march to join, a petition that needs signing, a political cause or candidate seeking volunteers, I'll be there if I can be.

But reading and thinking can and should inform action. Anyway, my instincts and personal history tell me the best way I can contribute is by reinforcing activist opposition through research and writing. Even before the election my reading had begun focusing more and more on understanding how and why my country could even consider, much less elect, a president like Donald J. Trump. Now the need to resist and reverse the political forces behind that election and repair whatever damage they do is taking that reading in fresh directions. Committing to writing about that reading gives the latter an added focus, purpose, and point.

Prior academic training provides some initial ideas about which trails to pursue. American political history and political thought, with an emphasis on American liberalism since the Civil War, and with a special interest in the progressivism that traces important roots to the Midwest, are in my scholarly wheelhouse, such as it is. These areas seem promising starting territory for any search for a usable past that can illuminate, instruct, or inspire present efforts.

No doubt others more capable and accomplished than I am will be exploring similar ground. Nevertheless, finding myself with time and opportunity as well as inclination, I see no reason not to dive in, and, with each passing day of the Trump administration, ever more compelling reasons to do so. Maybe nothing of interest or value will come of it. But if something does, I hope to try to fashion it into writing worth adding to the mix.

So here you have it. My attempt to act as a “majority of one.”  One more log on the fire being built against a long, cold, brutal winter.