In May of last year, a sheriff's deputy in Johnson County, Texas, went looking for a woman he believed had ended her own pregnancy. He didn't knock on doors. He typed into his computer: "had an abortion, search for female" and queried a nationwide web of more than 83,000 license-plate cameras run by a company called Flock. No warrant.

The search swept through 6,809 separate camera networks, and some of the cameras he reached into sit right here in Washington, where what that woman did is legal. Sit with that for a second. A police officer in a state that bans abortion used cameras paid for by Washington taxpayers to hunt a woman for something Washington law protects.

That is what a fractured democracy looks like. Not tanks in the street. Not a single dramatic collapse. Just a country falling apart, where the rules that govern our lives increasingly depend on which side of a state line you happen to be standing on.

We've lived most of our lives with an institutional safety net under us. That net is gone. Congress closed a recent quarter at 10 percent approval, a single point above the worst number Gallup has ever recorded, with 86 percent of the country disapproving. The Supreme Court's approval has sunk to the lowest point in the twenty-five years Gallup has tracked it. People stopped believing institutions at the top would act in good faith, and they've been proven right.

Whether you can end a pregnancy now depends on your zip code. Whether your transgender kids can get medical care depends on your zip code. What's taught in the classroom, what's allowed on the library shelf, whose marriage the law recognizes, how hard it is to vote: zip code, zip code, zip code. Since the Court overturned Roe in 2022, more than twenty states have built legal walls to protect reproductive and gender-affirming care while others moved to ban it and prosecute the people who provide it. Texas and Washington are not two versions of one country anymore. They are two countries that happen to share a currency. Which means Washington State is on its own.

Look at the shield law on the books here. It stops Washington police from arresting anyone, or helping another state's investigation, over health care that is legal in this state. It stops Washington companies from turning over the records. In plain terms, Washington has decided that when an order comes down from above and that order is unjust, the lawful response is to read it narrowly, work around it, and where it counts, refuse to carry it out. The Texas deputy who reached into our cameras is exactly why a law like that exists. A state that means to govern by its own values has to be willing to say no to the ones it rejects.

So the question we have to answer isn't "when will federal power change hands?" because no one is coming to save us, liberal or conservative. The question is who gets to decide what kind of place this is, and the answer turns out to be us. Not the White House. Not the Supreme Court. We the people.

A Northwest Progressive Institute poll out this month found that 64 percent of Washington voters disapprove of the President and only 30 percent approve, both records. We are not confused about our values. What we haven't fully done yet is govern with those values in mind, with no federal safety net underneath. This state has never really had to do that before.

Maybe you've spent the last few years grieving what's become of this country. Maybe you've looked away because grief gets heavy and the feed never stops. Neither one makes you weak. You were watching something you assumed was permanent come apart in real time. But grief can hide the false belief that important decisions all happen somewhere far away, and all you can do is watch them happen. That was never true, and what Washington becomes, what Snohomish County becomes, what Everett becomes, is being settled close to home, by the people who show up to settle it.

And that means real, unglamorous, hard work. When the federal government claws back funding from vital needs, the gap doesn't fill itself, it gets filled by whoever runs for the school board, sits through lengthy county budget meetings, staffs food pantries, or checks on the neighbor a few doors down. It gets filled by people who build the local institutions we need to survive.

No one is coming to save this country from the top. Everett's future will be decided in Everett. We all have an obligation to step up.