At the beginning of my career, way back in the last century, I used to cover meetings. School board, town council, etc. And generally speaking, these public officials were playing to empty rooms. There were usually two or three residents who made a point of going to all the meetings, and a lot of empty chairs around them. Once a school board facing budget cuts suggested dropping, among other things, the late buses that help students get home from after-school activities. A roomful of families showed up at that meeting to tearfully beg them to keep those bus routes. The meeting after that? Empty room again.

It’s essentially the same situation now (with a particular exception; let’s come back to that). When I go to meetings—as a resident, these days, not as a reporter—there might be a few people there with questions for town officials, or people getting awards, or Boy Scouts fulfilling badge requirements. But at many meetings, there are plenty of empty seats.

I mention this because I was at a vigil for Nex Benedict over the weekend, and what the speakers kept saying, over and over, is that people say they’re LGBT allies, say they’re supportive, but don’t necessarily show up at the public meetings where rules or legislation affecting LGBT people are being determined, or where books featuring LGBT people are being banned.

That’s true. Who’s been showing up at public meetings over the past few years? Moms for Liberty, or groups that act like them. They tell school boards in towns they don’t necessarily live in to ban books they may or may not have read, and those books almost invariably feature LGBT characters (except when they feature Black characters dealing with racism, or Jewish characters dealing with antisemitism). And they harass librarians in order to get their way. I wrote about this a few months back. Banning books about LGBT people, or banning a Pride flag raising or “safe space” rainbow stickers in schools, are ways of telling LGBT people they aren’t welcome or they shouldn’t exist.

At that vigil for Nex Benedict, multiple trans or nonbinary speakers said they’d never expected to survive to their thirties, or forties, and they wanted trans and nonbinary kids to know they could make it to adulthood, too. They wanted kids to see there was a future ahead for them.

That’s so poignant, and so important.

People who show up at public meetings are more likely to get what they want from public officials. So attend your local meetings. Make sure you know what’s going on in your town. If you disagree with what public officials are saying or doing, make sure you tell them so. And if members of minority groups are being attacked, show up and show them they’re not alone.