I was really angry seeing news sites refer to the the blue wave as just a ripple or having fizzled. Listen, for more than 20 years a majority of Americans have voted for a Democrat to represent them in Congress, yet in most of those elections the majority went to Republicans. It’s called gerrymandering, and it’s a mathematical fact. The deck is stacked very badly against those of us who think that queer people have a right to exist in society, that all people deserve health care, that the uber-rich aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, and so on. And while there are ways that we can undo gerrymandering of the House of Representatives, fixing the Senate is a lot harder.

Democrats will control the House. And that means that there will finally be some Congressional hearings into the corruption and worse that the Executive branch has been committing under Cadet Bonespur. There isn’t much we can do about the destruction of the Judicial branch that is being perpetrated during the next two years, but the thing those of us who care about equal rights and, oh, the future of the planet have to focus on is that we finally have a way to put some brakes on the fascist uprising. It’s a long term fight. We lost big two years ago. We call ourselves the Resistance because the bad guys have already taken over. This is an important step in the fight to take back the country, but we lost in 2016.

There was a bunch of other good news last night. Here are just a few of the highlights:

• Key West elected Teri Johnston, Florida’s first openly lesbian mayor
• New York elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress
• Colorado elected Jared Polis, the first openly gay governor in the US
• Minnesota elected Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim woman (alongside Rashida Tlaib) elected to Congress
• Massachusetts elected Ayanna Pressley, the first black woman elected to Congress in Massachusetts
• Kansas elected Sharice Davids, an openly gay ex-MMA fighter and one of the first Native American women (alongside Deb Haaland) elected to Congress
• Michigan elected Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American (and first Muslim woman, alongside Ilhan Omar) elected to Congress
• Kentucky elected Nima Kulkarni, the first Indian-American elected to Kentucky House of Representatives
• New Mexico elected Deb Haaland, one of the first Native American women (alongside Sharice Davids) elected to Congress
• Flemington, New Jersey elected Betsy Driver, the first openly intersex mayor of a city in the U.S.
• Indiana election J.D. Ford the first openly gay Indiana state legislature, defeating a long-time Republican incumbent in the process
• Kansas elected pro-gay-rights legislator Laura Kelly over pro-Trump and pro-voter suppression Republican
• Florida passed a constitutional amendment granting voting rights to about 1 million felons who have served their time
• Louisiana passed a constitutional amendment repealing a white supremacist policy regarding jury convictions
• Massachusetts voters soundly rejected a measure to strip away non-discrimination protections from transgender people

And election night isn’t the ending. Alexandra Erin put it very well on twitter earlier this week:

Let me be ridiculously clear about something: I am not counting on the Democrats, as a national organization, to fix anything.

Our country is on fire. We need them, but they are not the firefighters. We are.

They’re the water.

We are the firefighters. We can’t check out. This midterm wasn’t a fire and forget situation. We have to stay engaged. We have to call our congresspeople and demand that they stick to the guns, that they oppose Trump on everything. This is just one battle in the long war to take our country back. We can do it, but we have to keep fighting!