A 12-year-old in my town told her mother that her father was molesting her. The mother believed her daughter, and went to the police. The father was charged and entered a plea that qualified him for a diversion program instead of jail. The family was shattered, but it seemed possible that they might all be on the long and difficult road to healing because truth, belief in the girl, and her father’s willingness to atone for his actions emerged from the wreckage.

Then the father shot himself. He didn’t die right away, and the fragile circle of family and friends rallying around the girl regrouped instantly, taking up their posts at a death bed vigil. His daughter was among the many at his side. When he died a week later, the love and support diverted his way intensified as he was memorialized in the idealizing way that grief tends to bestow. It wasn’t exactly that the girl was blamed for her father’s death (she did a good enough job of that on her own). It was more that her experience was obliterated as all the attention shifted to his suffering. The blame set in a bit later. I imagine the girl wished she had never opened her mouth.

So it has gone with Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh, though with a less intense level of trauma and in a setting to determine whether the latter deserved a lifetime Supreme Court appointment, not a criminal conviction for sexual assault. Like the girl in my town, Dr. Blasey Ford reluctantly came forward to tell what happened to her, risking upending her (and her abuser’s) life.  Nearly everyone who listened to Blasey Ford’s testimony, including the President and Fox News, found her credible. At least for a moment.

Then Kavanaugh and the Republicans, in a show of high dudgeon, erased Blasey Ford’s experience with their own aggrieved victimhood. The woman who had transfixed a nation into hoping that at last people might hear and believe what so many girls and women endure was not so much blamed at first as obliterated. The blame came later.

Forty years ago a father fired a shot that took his own life and devastated his daughter’s beyond the original trauma he perpetrated. He was no doubt driven by shame and desperation, but it was also one last hostile act against her. The Republicans’ latest shot across the bow devastates victims of assault with a similarly punishing rebuke. And we wonder why women stay silent.

The tragedy that unfolded 40 years ago in my town is over. The man who had the last word back then is dead. I don’t know what happened to his daughter, or his wife, but I know their lives continued one way or another. I hope they are well, able to integrate this trauma into lives that will always bear but also transcend the scars.

The Supreme Court hearings are also over for now; the Republicans have had the last word. At least for now. The mid-terms are coming on November 6. Channel your rage, fear, despair—and hope–into voting them out. We will continue, one way or another.

Make sure you and everyone you know is registered to vote and casts a ballot on or before November 6. Everything you need to know is at votesaveamerica.org:

As men who have used their power and privilege to harass and assault women and children continue to be called out and sometimes punished (others are elevated to the White House), the discussion has expanded to include the role of bystanders—those who knew, but turned a blind eye.

Speaking out—not just by victims, but by all of us, particularly men–will be crucial to change the culture. Offenders must make amends. Bystanders must become upstanders.

We see this in the political realm as well. Jeff Flake, following his impassioned concession speech from the Senate floor excoriating his fellow Republicans for tolerating Trump’s behavior, wrote in the New York Times,” to have a vital democracy, there can be no bystanders.”

And yet there are plenty—not only Republican enablers in Congress, but among voters.

The United States has one of the lowest rates of voter turnout among western democracies: According to the Pew Research Center, we rank 28^th among 35 OECD countries. This is partly because many other governments take the lead in promoting voter registration, whereas the responsibility falls mainly to individuals in the United States. A confusing patchwork of rules, access, and requirements that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction further complicates voting. The Pew report points out that the percentage of voting-eligible Americans who register is much lower than in similar democracies. Additional impediments include seemingly innocuous ones such as Election Day occurring on a weekday. And, of course, there are brazenly discriminatory barriers like restrictive voter ID laws, the denial of civil rights, and other forms of voter suppression.

But another huge factor is voter apathy.  I have done a lot of phone banking in the past several years, and I can’t keep track of the number of respondents who tell me that “Politics has nothing to do with me,” “They’re all the same,” and “What difference does it make?”

A lot, actually, as anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the last year can attest.

In the 2016 presidential election, about 58% of voting-eligible Americans voted. This was about the same as the 2012 election, and a few percentage points below 2008’s turnout. There are a lot of reasons Donald Trump now tweets from the Oval Office, but one of them is that his campaign was successful in turning out a higher proportion of swing state white rural voters than turned out for Romney in 2012, while Clinton lost ground from Obama’s 2012 tally in those same crucial areas. Social science research has found that conservative/Republican voters tend to value loyalty more and therefore coalesce around their party’s candidates, whereas liberal/Democratic voters—especially young ones–are less inclined to do so.

Mid-term and off-year elections are decided by even fewer people. The United States Elections Project estimates that only 36.4 percent of voting-eligible Americans bothered to vote in 2014. That’s when Democrats lost control of the U.S. Senate, just as they lost control of the House, many statehouses, and redistricting in the 2010 mid-terms, with devastating, long-term consequences.

But as with the sexual misconduct revelations, perhaps people are waking up to the consequences of being a political bystander. A robust resistance has arisen against the current administration, with more people running for public office from the local to national level than ever before. The surprisingly large Democratic victories in Virginia underscore the impact of moving from bystander to participant: Turnout was the highest it’s been in 20 years for a gubernatorial election. Voters aged 18-29 came out in especially high numbers, doubling their turnout rate since 2009. More than two-thirds of the youth vote went to the uncharismatic Democratic candidate for governor, and an astonishing 15 (and counting) seats in the House of Delegates flipped from Republican to Democrat.

In the realm of sexual misconduct and abuse, people who formerly stayed silent are finding their voice. We are witnessing a hopeful sea-change as a result. In the realm of politics, your vote is your voice. Perhaps we will see a similarly encouraging sea-change as more bystanders understand how necessary it is to stand up and speak out.

I was 17 years old and vacationing in Germany with my parents, who sat facing me on the train. I stared out the window, the seat beside me empty. As the train traveled through the Rhine Valley, we picked up more passengers. Eventually a middle-aged man boarded the crowded train, sat down next to me, and unfolded his newspaper. I continued to stare out the window. After a while, the train entered a tunnel and everything went dark.

Suddenly, the man was all over me, pressing his face into mine, groping my breasts, my thighs. I froze, too shocked and embarrassed to move or utter a sound. The instant the train emerged from the tunnel, he returned to reading his newspaper.

My parents looked at my ashen face and asked what was wrong.

“Nothing,” I mumbled.

I hadn’t thought much about this incident over the years.

Until Donald Trump was caught on tape bragging about forcing himself on women.  Then I was back in that dark tunnel again, along with millions of women remembering the unwanted advances we’ve silently endured.

Meanwhile, Trump’s doubled down on the disrespect that’s been evident throughout his campaign by demeaning and threatening those who have come forward with allegations against him.

“I don’t know these women,” he says dismissively.

He’s right about that–though not in the way he intended.

Trump did not know the woman who says he groped her on the plane, just as the man on the train didn’t know me. No one who views others as simply there for the taking bothers to know—or care—anything about them.

Trump may not know us, but we know him. And we’re tired of putting up with him and his kind.

I am no longer that scared-silent girl on the train. I have found my voice, and I intend to speak up.

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Please feel free to share your experiences and your thoughts.