It is dangerous work sometimes, and at the end of the day, when you take a oath and you say you are gonna represent people, you gotta be up for the fight no matter what.

Yes.

[audience applauding] So when we talk about where we go from here, what's next, I think we all have to ground ourselves in the reality that there is no perfect Democratic Party- Right ... just like there's no perfect elected official.

So let's rid ourselves of that, that fallacy.

But when it comes to achieving what we deserve, we gotta, we gotta lead the cause ourselves.

We have to go create it.

We can't look to the Democratic Party to say, you know, y- y- you know...

Yes

It's the cold truth, but we do wanna know how you're feeling.

Well, thank you for that question and, and recognizing the humanity that's behind all of this because the truth is that this is so much more than lines on a map.

This is, this is really about who gets to fully participate in this, in this democratic experiment here in America, right? When we thought we had made so much progress.To be living it in real time, it is, it is, um, it's obviously troubling.

But I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna tell you, um, I, I, I'm hopeful and I'm gonna tell you why.

Because after that 10-hour committee hearing, and I didn't, I probably didn't emphasize this enough, Angela, was that as disappointing as it was to sit in a committee hearing for 10 hours and knowing that there was nothing that was gonna change with my Republican colleagues, they, they could have basically been like little robots sitting there, 'cause they were gonna vote how they were gonna vote.

The, the people who were so committed, the hundreds of people who came to the Capitol and stayed from like 1:00 in the afternoon to like 5:00 in the morning just to be heard, the brilliance and the diversity of the people who came from across the state really inspired me, and it reminded me of how fortunate I am.

So yes, while it is, while we are in trying times, I am incredibly fortunate just to be in a position to try to speak on behalf of not just the people who deserve representation today, but the people who fought to give us the right to have this representation, the people who filed the lawsuits, the people who marched, the people who bled, the people who died to give us this representation, and I just feel incredibly privileged to be in that position.

Wow.

Sure.

That, you know, we, we as a city and as, as a state and as a country, this is, this is bigger than just maps.

This is about whether or not certain people in society are gonna be able to fully participate in democracy.

That's what this is about.

So this is, this is not about some Supreme Court decision just saying, "Oh, we're complying with the Supreme Court." Look, the Supreme Court said in Plessy v.

Ferguson that you could, you could segregate.

They didn't mandate that we segregate, but lo- but states like Louisiana chose to take that decision and, and, and segregate based upon race.

[laughs]