Keep calm, carry on.

We lost.

This morning Governor Walker signed into law his “budget repair bill” that has ripped the state apart and has tragic effects for so many of us here in Wisconsin and across the country. Despite days and weeks of protesting often outside of a locked Capitol as Walker refused to hear our pleas, despite standing in snow and temperatures in the teens with tens of thousands of other protestors, despite the letters to our legislators, to our governor, to the media, to anyone OUT THERE who could help, we lost.

We lost the battle. We did not lose the war.

After yesterday’s vote in the Assembly, I stood with a group of protestors that shouted “Shame, shame, shame!” as Republican legislators filed out of the Assembly room, flanked by police escorts. They pointedly avoided eye contact, refusing to acknowledge the thousands of us who had crowded into the Capitol who came to have our voices heard.

I did not shout shame. Instead, I stood, speechless. It was utterly surreal. After nearly four weeks of protestors talking, asking, hoping, waiting for a compromise to this destructive bill, nothing, not a single bit of the bill, was changed.

I stood speechless, and I cried.

It was so hard to believe that after so long, after investing so much time and energy into fighting this bill, we could lose without so much as a single concession from Walker or his fellow Republicans. It was unimaginable that my voice and the voice of the hundreds of thousands of us over the course of this last month could not move him, not even an inch from his dogma. It felt like something had died within me.

And then it was reborn, like the Phoenix rising from the ashes. Because after my tears dried, a calm resolve filled the place of sadness. It was time to move on. Time to make sure that these rights are restored, that democracy does not get trampled again, that legislators and this Governor are recalled, that the courts step in to mitigate if not repeal, this legislation. It is time to move on. To keep calm and carry on.

Governor Walker, rest assured. This will not stand.