I'm trying to game this all out -- what's next given let's say the realities -- and I get a bit of a headache. I dunno, may be from hope conflicting with realities, I dunno, maybe a conflict between can't hurt and won't help...
Hope it's not that old fart mentality morphing into the loss of the last marbles...
Remember Sink the Bismarck? They had this big map room in a deep sub-basement somewhere, pushing model ships around on a map, directing ships here and there.
That's not you and me. We're in the boiler room of H.M.S. Hood. No need to concern ourselves with the larger questions, just keep the boilers running and prepare to meet your maker.
But don't you see? We win the war! Sure, you and I are buried inside a thousand tons of steel at the bottom of the North Sea, but democracy triumphs and fascism is defeated! Hooray!
Hey, anybody who sneers that these protests are performative and ineffectual, that attendees are bougie, pussy-hat wearing wine moms, can fuck all the way off.
Most of the online sneers are coming from professional lefties, white guys with podcasts who think protests are too tame when what we really need is revolution -- except they can't tear themselves away from their gaming consoles long enough to start one. Most people who say "you're doing it the wrong way" aren't actually doing anything themselves but talking.
Could be, tho for every one a those there's 10 (50? 10,000?) just laying low so's to slide under the radar and keep doin' the work of propping up what's left...
And should add we hear from plenty of them – there's a not insubstantial portion of the Steep Date hirelings that have existential circumstances and decisions on their plate.
I expected a crowd in Hip Blue Dot Asheville: but in the smaller Red towns, Waynesville, Sylva, Cherokee (the Reservation of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee: having a well managed casino boom...), Franklin, profoundly GOP Marshall managed noteworthy demonstrations of several hundred to a thousand: in M.Cawthorne's old district, this is noteworthy.
The region is tied to a tourist and retirement economy: and the clumsy "burn it all down" DOGE cuts have hit economic meat and bone...
I felt good at the ~300 crowd we managed in Murphy...
Nice. I hope others REBIDders from the Lands of Hinter chime in as well – the metro areas get mosta the coverage (tho I gotta say USA Today showed many photos of smaller metro area demo crowds).
Right? Frickin' UTAH; admittedly Salt Lake trends a skosh more liberal than the rest of the state (rest in peace sadly missed Cosmic Aeroplane Bookstore) but it's still an amazing turnout for Mormonland.
Someone over at Parker Molloy's place pointed to a quote from The Atlantic, "cardboard-carrying crusaders full of inchoate anger." Sorry I didn't have time to organize a million people to march in lockstep while waving identical printed posters of Jeffery Goldberg, I still have a day job.
Yeah. Unknown numbers of folks (by design), the signs, the White House fretting behind added fencing, while the occupant is outta town at the golfing of last resort...
We missed it all except the aftermath Sunday, walking round the Mall, reading signs left behind...and getting the latest from cops at the truck-blocked intersections and les barricades ("They'll be up til Thursday")...Ukrainian protest at the Lincoln in the afternoon (I donated my extra flag), and the blessed soft ice cream trucks randomly deployed...
Walking on stilts takes talent! I tried using drywall stilts once. I did pretty well! I spent a couple hours working on them Until I fell forward and broke my nose.
A likely story. I hear you got it broken in the third round of that bout with Dixie Wells. Great little fighter that Dixie, shame what happened to him later.
The protests in my little town have for years been the same 20-30 Universalist-Unitarians, LGBTQ+ folks and assorted United Church of Christ and (!) Catholics. Average age range 15-80. I wish it were more but at least you get to reconnect with some people who live across town. No one expects to accomplish anything except to let the tv news know we exist and disagree with whatever horror is being inflicted on someone somewhere today.
The Kansas City protest filled the park where they do that sort of thing AND all the surrounding streets were lined with people on both sides. I’ve never seen that many people at that location before. It was incredible.
We did have one pickup driver MAGA nutjob who tried to cause trouble but the cops squashed him pretty quickly.
Here in Milwaukee...I got the standard email saying "Gather in front of the old Federal Building" which is the usual location for protests. I thought, there are going to be more people than can fit on a sidewalk! They did end up blocking-off Wisconsin Avenue but I don't think they upgraded the sound system, nobody where I was standing could hear a thing. Yes, there were several thousand of us. Better too many than not enough, I suppose.
All the way back to Vietnam, and a march of about 30 people in my little town, led by the Unitarian minister, my parents' friend Norman, a Korea vet, bent over to me and said, "Nixon's going to be pissing in his pants when he hears about this." It certainly is funny and cringe when you think about it individual by individual. I was just listening to Cory Booker on the radio, though, talking about his speech, and found myself impressed by a thing he kept insisting on: that individuals, including himself, aren't what it's about--"it's not you and me, it's we the people"--and that's like what I tell myself (on Saturday, with my daughter, on Fifth Avenue), that signs can be cool, but when you go on a march, the important thing you bring is really your body, adding to the mass in the aerial photos. It literally is "what democracy looks like", in the sense that it really provides an authentic image of democracy that people can process and use.
I started college in 1965. That fall there were 8 or 10 people, grouped around the fountain on UVM’s green, protesting the war—and getting pelted by frat boys with eggs. At the end of Spring semester five years later the entire campus was shut down, finals cancelled, nobody knew or cared about their grades or even if they could graduate. The protest was all-encompassing. That is what needs to happen on a national scale.
"Five years later." Cut to: Today, where social media, the internet, and etc. accelerate that process by orders of magnitude. I read there's another march scheduled for April 19. That's in 12 days.
Adding to the aerial photograph, yes, but also--and sue me if it sounds sentimental--showing everyone present that they're not alone in their rage, frustration, fear, and detestation. That helps. It also raises the next big question: Once we all "get" that and realize our numbers, then what?
Some big elections in Virginia in November, I don't know if Elon can be trusted to show up handing out posterboard checks and wearing a tricorner hat, but we can hope...
Sorry I don't have anything more imaginative to offer than "Win ALL the elections."
Not because of any cringe factor, just from a sense of ineffectiveness mixed with my wife’s mobility issues, we haven’t done more than honk and wave in support at the local protesters since the Women’s March 8 years (!) ago. I do have good memories of that one; we were in the crowd that jammed the big yard in front of the statehouse in Montpelier; it had the sort of broad coalition and solidarity between milktoast liberals like me and leftists of several stripes that you felt on Saturday.
Trump has broken the Constitution. Used to be, at least white cis males like you and me could place some trust in its protections. Now we’re all in the same boat with immigrants and minorities. Just getting rid of Tubby (and Vance and Johnson and...) won’t make it easy, or even possible, to glue the pieces of it back into their prior state, imperfect though it was. We and the disfavored groups are going to need all the solidarity we can muster to resist oligarchical fascism.
Protests will be truly effective when they get big enough to overwhelm the White House and and the supreme court and all their defenses. I can perhaps see that happening after Social Security checks fail to arrive. A lot will ride on whether the military obeys unconstitutional orders from Tubby, because merely retaking Congress in the midterms isn’t going to be nearly enough.
I just typed out what I think *would* be enough, but deleted it because I am old and a coward and I will keep my head down until that is no longer possible.
I don't think we're likely to come up with something before the midterms that could be as effective as the midterms could be. But the mood in the country leading up to the midterms is really important. Even now, Republican Congressmen are afraid to show their faces at a town hall meeting. Maxwell Frost, in his speech at the DC rally, said he and Sen. Chris Murphy have been touring together, holding town halls in Republican congressional districts. Anything that gets complaints before the public is good.
Des Moines Iowa, a blue dot in a red sea, had a few thousand march from Cowles Commons downtown (near where slimeball rep Zach Nunn has an office) to our lovely, gold-plated Iowa Capitol. It's about a mile, the weather was chilly and windy and we were very boisterous. The crowd was a few hundred in the Commons but swelled dramatically was we walked east. The organizers had a rather crappy sound system, which was unfortunate, but there were great signs everywhere and folks seemed energized. My best friend and I made signs: mine was a bit wordy, as is typical for me; hers was precisely lettered and just said Hands Off. We went to our favorite local brewery afterwards and are looking forward to the next action.
Can you imagine the SCANDAL if such a thing were built today? It's TOO GOOD for the government! Make 'em work in Quonset huts thirty miles outside of town!
Too true! Our beauty was built in the late 1800s and is as gorgeous inside as it is outside. There are four domes in addition to the larger gold-plated central one. And it's on a hill east of downtown. No way they'd build something like it today.
Some have mentioned the suckitude of the sound systems at their local protests, and I will be sending a memo to Mr. Soros about this forthwith. It was the same here in Madison (where we really have no excuse for not having better sound). But it seems also true that protesters these days don't much care if they can hear who's on the stage. What could they say that we don't already know? We're here to see each other, to see we're not alone, that we're not crazy, it really is as bad as it seems to us. And so much care put into our hand-lettered signs, like we understand that WE are the real show, not whoever's up front with the shitty bullhorn. I like it.
Hearted, but generally, when waves go in all directions they do so because great big thing hits lake, or shock waves from something even greater bigger...
I have to confess: I had been intending to blow off the protests Saturday, feeling like we're just farting in a hurricane and trying to justify it to myself with "well, I'm an INTROVERT". I had memories of the Occupy protest I attended at the South Carolina State House, a few dozen people and an asshole right-wing infiltrator standing next to me talking about how excited he was to get free stuff from the government.
Turns out our local protest was at least a few THOUSAND, a huge diverse crowd of old and young and a whole LOT of dogs. Everyone cheered when the fire truck drove past and honked their horn! Hearing the speakers depended a lot on exactly where you stood, but everyone made up for it with signs. I was debating about bringing a sign but copped out and just wore my Wonkette shirt and my blue "HELL NO" baseball cap; I felt kinda dumb when I saw all the obviously last-minute signs folks had, one lady with a pizza box with her text on the back. As I left, the traffic was really slow so I went looking on my music thumb drive for a particular song to play to the folks on the sidewalks, but the random selection feature kept failing me and I was afraid I'd miss the chance; finally as I waited to turn onto Monroe Avenue my choice came up and I rolled down the car windows and blasted Jimmy Ryan's "Super Psycho Nazi Racist Trump Is Psychopathic" to the crowd, who I hope enjoyed it:
Then I went to Costco and realized a guy living on his own really probably *doesn't* need a warehouse store membership. Ah, well. I'm glad I went out, though.
I was in Sebastapol CA, known as "Peacetown" around here in Northern California. The only hey-hos was 1 attempt from a handful of pre-teens with their parents. The drum circle as 1 guy with a conga and there was a guy with a sousaphone wandering around, along with 1 guy in a pony costume just running up and down Main St. One guy with a memorized rant about how 9/11 was an inside job planned by the Rothschilds. And 1 Cybertruck with a "Veteran against Trump" sign on the front. He got some cheers.
That was it for hippie color. Around 500 people, olds heavily represented but all ages and some families. I was half-prepared for another ANSWER-style clusterfuck, but these were not people protesting for fun. They were pissed and focused. Hands Off was very prominent, along with a lot of concern for democracy and the Constitution. Some Trump/Musk bashing but not as much as you'd expect. I don't know if it will lead to anything, but a lot of people learned they were not alone. Just like there's a lot more liberals in Michigan than you think, there's a lot more Trumpers in Northern CA than you think, so that matters.
In Nanuet NY we turned out a very respectable 1000 sign wavers/chanters, admittedly mostly over 60 and white, but as that seems to be the demographic of the whole area anyway, we actually were what democracy looks like.
I'm trying to game this all out -- what's next given let's say the realities -- and I get a bit of a headache. I dunno, may be from hope conflicting with realities, I dunno, maybe a conflict between can't hurt and won't help...
Hope it's not that old fart mentality morphing into the loss of the last marbles...
[cue little scruffy kid, with a small leather drawstring sack, runnin' behind, yellin' "Hey mister – these yer marbles?"]
Remember Sink the Bismarck? They had this big map room in a deep sub-basement somewhere, pushing model ships around on a map, directing ships here and there.
That's not you and me. We're in the boiler room of H.M.S. Hood. No need to concern ourselves with the larger questions, just keep the boilers running and prepare to meet your maker.
Oh, noooo!!!
I count on you for optimism. I can supply all the headwinds myself, no help needed.
But don't you see? We win the war! Sure, you and I are buried inside a thousand tons of steel at the bottom of the North Sea, but democracy triumphs and fascism is defeated! Hooray!
Hey, anybody who sneers that these protests are performative and ineffectual, that attendees are bougie, pussy-hat wearing wine moms, can fuck all the way off.
Most of the online sneers are coming from professional lefties, white guys with podcasts who think protests are too tame when what we really need is revolution -- except they can't tear themselves away from their gaming consoles long enough to start one. Most people who say "you're doing it the wrong way" aren't actually doing anything themselves but talking.
Could be, tho for every one a those there's 10 (50? 10,000?) just laying low so's to slide under the radar and keep doin' the work of propping up what's left...
And should add we hear from plenty of them – there's a not insubstantial portion of the Steep Date hirelings that have existential circumstances and decisions on their plate.
I expected a crowd in Hip Blue Dot Asheville: but in the smaller Red towns, Waynesville, Sylva, Cherokee (the Reservation of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee: having a well managed casino boom...), Franklin, profoundly GOP Marshall managed noteworthy demonstrations of several hundred to a thousand: in M.Cawthorne's old district, this is noteworthy.
The region is tied to a tourist and retirement economy: and the clumsy "burn it all down" DOGE cuts have hit economic meat and bone...
I felt good at the ~300 crowd we managed in Murphy...
Nice. I hope others REBIDders from the Lands of Hinter chime in as well – the metro areas get mosta the coverage (tho I gotta say USA Today showed many photos of smaller metro area demo crowds).
Waving from the Lands of Hinter! There were a lot of protests in Iowa, including a few thousand folks marching in Des Moines.
Thank you for your service
I was impressed at the photos I saw from Utah.
Right? Frickin' UTAH; admittedly Salt Lake trends a skosh more liberal than the rest of the state (rest in peace sadly missed Cosmic Aeroplane Bookstore) but it's still an amazing turnout for Mormonland.
We had a few hundred in Rapid City
Fuck a bunch of white guys with podcasts!
This is now on my list of prospective demo signs. Thanks!
Gonna be hard to beat "Detroit Hates Kid Rock"
Nah, I'm not fucking even one of them.
Aren't you a white guy with a substack?
I write it all down. Sure, I could drone into a microphone for an hour. I couldn't bear to listen to it though.
Not as effective as fire bombing a Wa|-Mart.
Funny you should mention Walmart. I've been wondering what percentage of those monthly SS checks goes straight to Walmart. They can't be pleased.
Wal-Mart, the company who paid their workers so horribly back in the mid 2000s that they actively recommended them applying for food stamps.
Excuse me, I think you meant "employee benefits."
The only "seize the means of production" they really care about is online memes.
Someone over at Parker Molloy's place pointed to a quote from The Atlantic, "cardboard-carrying crusaders full of inchoate anger." Sorry I didn't have time to organize a million people to march in lockstep while waving identical printed posters of Jeffery Goldberg, I still have a day job.
The sneers I have seen have come from the professional centrists
Yeah. Unknown numbers of folks (by design), the signs, the White House fretting behind added fencing, while the occupant is outta town at the golfing of last resort...
We missed it all except the aftermath Sunday, walking round the Mall, reading signs left behind...and getting the latest from cops at the truck-blocked intersections and les barricades ("They'll be up til Thursday")...Ukrainian protest at the Lincoln in the afternoon (I donated my extra flag), and the blessed soft ice cream trucks randomly deployed...
Well, one thing Jan 6th showed us is that fences and barricades can come down if you've got enough people.
As long as there aren't any of those stupid big ass puppets, I'm good with it. I hate those stupid puppets.
It was great to see. Heartening.
We had stilt walkers. I didn't mind.
Were they mimes? Because...damn.
Come on now, things aren't THAT bad. I say we hold the mimes in reserve until... well, forever, but let's not tell them that.
Walking on stilts takes talent! I tried using drywall stilts once. I did pretty well! I spent a couple hours working on them Until I fell forward and broke my nose.
So THIS is what 'doing pretty well' means...
!
A likely story. I hear you got it broken in the third round of that bout with Dixie Wells. Great little fighter that Dixie, shame what happened to him later.
I heard he went dry.
I like big ass puppets. They're playful and spark a little joy, making good energy, lightening the dreadful seriousness of what's happening.
Do these hands holding me up by the legs make my ass look big?
Thanks for making me look -- The Bread and Puppet Theater is coming to Baltimore next weekend! https://breadandpuppet.org/tour
If you have never been to the Bread and Puppet Museum, a big old barn full of decades of puppets and props, it’s actually worth a trip to Glover.
You can’t be the good guys if you hate hippies worse than Nazis.
You do a buncha Zyklon, Miller, back in the hippie days?
Nah, I mostly did drugs and my old lady.
Sometimes simultaneously!
The protests in my little town have for years been the same 20-30 Universalist-Unitarians, LGBTQ+ folks and assorted United Church of Christ and (!) Catholics. Average age range 15-80. I wish it were more but at least you get to reconnect with some people who live across town. No one expects to accomplish anything except to let the tv news know we exist and disagree with whatever horror is being inflicted on someone somewhere today.
And that's all it has to be.
The Kansas City protest filled the park where they do that sort of thing AND all the surrounding streets were lined with people on both sides. I’ve never seen that many people at that location before. It was incredible.
We did have one pickup driver MAGA nutjob who tried to cause trouble but the cops squashed him pretty quickly.
Here in Milwaukee...I got the standard email saying "Gather in front of the old Federal Building" which is the usual location for protests. I thought, there are going to be more people than can fit on a sidewalk! They did end up blocking-off Wisconsin Avenue but I don't think they upgraded the sound system, nobody where I was standing could hear a thing. Yes, there were several thousand of us. Better too many than not enough, I suppose.
All the way back to Vietnam, and a march of about 30 people in my little town, led by the Unitarian minister, my parents' friend Norman, a Korea vet, bent over to me and said, "Nixon's going to be pissing in his pants when he hears about this." It certainly is funny and cringe when you think about it individual by individual. I was just listening to Cory Booker on the radio, though, talking about his speech, and found myself impressed by a thing he kept insisting on: that individuals, including himself, aren't what it's about--"it's not you and me, it's we the people"--and that's like what I tell myself (on Saturday, with my daughter, on Fifth Avenue), that signs can be cool, but when you go on a march, the important thing you bring is really your body, adding to the mass in the aerial photos. It literally is "what democracy looks like", in the sense that it really provides an authentic image of democracy that people can process and use.
I started college in 1965. That fall there were 8 or 10 people, grouped around the fountain on UVM’s green, protesting the war—and getting pelted by frat boys with eggs. At the end of Spring semester five years later the entire campus was shut down, finals cancelled, nobody knew or cared about their grades or even if they could graduate. The protest was all-encompassing. That is what needs to happen on a national scale.
"Five years later." Cut to: Today, where social media, the internet, and etc. accelerate that process by orders of magnitude. I read there's another march scheduled for April 19. That's in 12 days.
My hope for protest politics is that it may provide a national crash course in Civics, which the country sorely needs.
Adding to the aerial photograph, yes, but also--and sue me if it sounds sentimental--showing everyone present that they're not alone in their rage, frustration, fear, and detestation. That helps. It also raises the next big question: Once we all "get" that and realize our numbers, then what?
Some big elections in Virginia in November, I don't know if Elon can be trusted to show up handing out posterboard checks and wearing a tricorner hat, but we can hope...
Sorry I don't have anything more imaginative to offer than "Win ALL the elections."
Goals first; strategies second.
Not because of any cringe factor, just from a sense of ineffectiveness mixed with my wife’s mobility issues, we haven’t done more than honk and wave in support at the local protesters since the Women’s March 8 years (!) ago. I do have good memories of that one; we were in the crowd that jammed the big yard in front of the statehouse in Montpelier; it had the sort of broad coalition and solidarity between milktoast liberals like me and leftists of several stripes that you felt on Saturday.
Trump has broken the Constitution. Used to be, at least white cis males like you and me could place some trust in its protections. Now we’re all in the same boat with immigrants and minorities. Just getting rid of Tubby (and Vance and Johnson and...) won’t make it easy, or even possible, to glue the pieces of it back into their prior state, imperfect though it was. We and the disfavored groups are going to need all the solidarity we can muster to resist oligarchical fascism.
Protests will be truly effective when they get big enough to overwhelm the White House and and the supreme court and all their defenses. I can perhaps see that happening after Social Security checks fail to arrive. A lot will ride on whether the military obeys unconstitutional orders from Tubby, because merely retaking Congress in the midterms isn’t going to be nearly enough.
I just typed out what I think *would* be enough, but deleted it because I am old and a coward and I will keep my head down until that is no longer possible.
I don't think we're likely to come up with something before the midterms that could be as effective as the midterms could be. But the mood in the country leading up to the midterms is really important. Even now, Republican Congressmen are afraid to show their faces at a town hall meeting. Maxwell Frost, in his speech at the DC rally, said he and Sen. Chris Murphy have been touring together, holding town halls in Republican congressional districts. Anything that gets complaints before the public is good.
Thanks. This is hopeful, and hopefulness hasn't been made illegal.
Des Moines Iowa, a blue dot in a red sea, had a few thousand march from Cowles Commons downtown (near where slimeball rep Zach Nunn has an office) to our lovely, gold-plated Iowa Capitol. It's about a mile, the weather was chilly and windy and we were very boisterous. The crowd was a few hundred in the Commons but swelled dramatically was we walked east. The organizers had a rather crappy sound system, which was unfortunate, but there were great signs everywhere and folks seemed energized. My best friend and I made signs: mine was a bit wordy, as is typical for me; hers was precisely lettered and just said Hands Off. We went to our favorite local brewery afterwards and are looking forward to the next action.
"... our lovely, gold-plated Iowa Capitol."
Can you imagine the SCANDAL if such a thing were built today? It's TOO GOOD for the government! Make 'em work in Quonset huts thirty miles outside of town!
Too true! Our beauty was built in the late 1800s and is as gorgeous inside as it is outside. There are four domes in addition to the larger gold-plated central one. And it's on a hill east of downtown. No way they'd build something like it today.
Gold is for Trump's toilets.
Actually, Iowa isn't big enough to be a red sea, more like a red farm pond.
Some have mentioned the suckitude of the sound systems at their local protests, and I will be sending a memo to Mr. Soros about this forthwith. It was the same here in Madison (where we really have no excuse for not having better sound). But it seems also true that protesters these days don't much care if they can hear who's on the stage. What could they say that we don't already know? We're here to see each other, to see we're not alone, that we're not crazy, it really is as bad as it seems to us. And so much care put into our hand-lettered signs, like we understand that WE are the real show, not whoever's up front with the shitty bullhorn. I like it.
The sound system was adequate for the Commons but not for the crowd at the Capitol. It was cool, we cheered even if we didn't know what was said.
Honestly, [waves generally in all directions] would do just as well.
Hearted, but generally, when waves go in all directions they do so because great big thing hits lake, or shock waves from something even greater bigger...
I have to confess: I had been intending to blow off the protests Saturday, feeling like we're just farting in a hurricane and trying to justify it to myself with "well, I'm an INTROVERT". I had memories of the Occupy protest I attended at the South Carolina State House, a few dozen people and an asshole right-wing infiltrator standing next to me talking about how excited he was to get free stuff from the government.
Turns out our local protest was at least a few THOUSAND, a huge diverse crowd of old and young and a whole LOT of dogs. Everyone cheered when the fire truck drove past and honked their horn! Hearing the speakers depended a lot on exactly where you stood, but everyone made up for it with signs. I was debating about bringing a sign but copped out and just wore my Wonkette shirt and my blue "HELL NO" baseball cap; I felt kinda dumb when I saw all the obviously last-minute signs folks had, one lady with a pizza box with her text on the back. As I left, the traffic was really slow so I went looking on my music thumb drive for a particular song to play to the folks on the sidewalks, but the random selection feature kept failing me and I was afraid I'd miss the chance; finally as I waited to turn onto Monroe Avenue my choice came up and I rolled down the car windows and blasted Jimmy Ryan's "Super Psycho Nazi Racist Trump Is Psychopathic" to the crowd, who I hope enjoyed it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFqqSVpsEVQ
Then I went to Costco and realized a guy living on his own really probably *doesn't* need a warehouse store membership. Ah, well. I'm glad I went out, though.
I'm so desperate I was willing to suppress my hatred of "Hey Hey Ho Ho ___ Has Got To Go." Another gift from the fuckin' boomers.
I was in Sebastapol CA, known as "Peacetown" around here in Northern California. The only hey-hos was 1 attempt from a handful of pre-teens with their parents. The drum circle as 1 guy with a conga and there was a guy with a sousaphone wandering around, along with 1 guy in a pony costume just running up and down Main St. One guy with a memorized rant about how 9/11 was an inside job planned by the Rothschilds. And 1 Cybertruck with a "Veteran against Trump" sign on the front. He got some cheers.
That was it for hippie color. Around 500 people, olds heavily represented but all ages and some families. I was half-prepared for another ANSWER-style clusterfuck, but these were not people protesting for fun. They were pissed and focused. Hands Off was very prominent, along with a lot of concern for democracy and the Constitution. Some Trump/Musk bashing but not as much as you'd expect. I don't know if it will lead to anything, but a lot of people learned they were not alone. Just like there's a lot more liberals in Michigan than you think, there's a lot more Trumpers in Northern CA than you think, so that matters.
Good ol' Sebastopol!
There was a sign in Utica said "So bad even introverts are here!"
We had one of those as well!
Introverts Unite! (oh never mind...)
Protests have their place and they do work, historically proven. Look at India. Gandhi knew how to provoke a response and rally a nation.
Even in oppressive East Euro countries, the people united were not to be denied.
The labor movement in the US once the leader of the world for workers' rights (albeit somewhat whitewashed) is another example.
And then the ever popular American Civil Rights movement.
I am holding myself in reserve for the next wave. I prefer to make my case one on one in bars, the supermarket, at the gym.
Even my barber knows where I stand!
"We will fight them in the bars, and in the supermarket, and at the gym. WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER."
[barber be goin' "yeah, yeah, you want short back & sides?"]
In Nanuet NY we turned out a very respectable 1000 sign wavers/chanters, admittedly mostly over 60 and white, but as that seems to be the demographic of the whole area anyway, we actually were what democracy looks like.