Stay the course

Fellow-traveling in DC

It catches me up short when I consider that I’ve been protesting Trump for the better part of a decade. What is that? Dedication? Situational awareness? Stubbornness? Delusion? A hobby, like going to National Milk Bottle Collectors Convention, except with (I’m assuming) more angst?

Many of us persist in ideas and courses of actions — not necessarily related to politics; sometime in careers, affinities, sports fandom, marriages etc. — for years, even lifetimes, in the teeth of reversals and even apparent defeat. I think of lifelong lost-causers like Marshal Petain acolyte Jacques Isorni, and extreme-marathon flame-keepers like the peace vigil attendants of Western Europe. (You may know that such a vigil had been kept in a tiny tent in Washington’s Lafayette Park continuously since 1981, and that Tubby just had it removed.)

Am I like that? I’m mulish, certainly. But those people have extraordinary devotion and staying power and, especially, an unusually high threshold of disappointment. The vigil keepers must be aware that they’re never going to see peace on earth. For the ones with faith in a life to come, for themselves and for the people they’re trying to save, that probably doesn’t matter so much. But maybe even the secular saints feel — know, I should say; no one carries such a load so far on a mere hunch — that their vigil has some effect in the direction they endorse. It’s like that old saying about the stars and the handful of mud. Perhaps, as the stakes are grand rather than personal, it’s more like a struggle to wrench back the lever that lunatics keep pulling toward the “world destruction” setting. But I prefer the cheerier version.

And we’re ahead of the game: we did beat Trump once, after all, and his dismal approval numbers suggest we can claw power back from him and his Republican mob again. (Yeah OK I know but don’t even say it — in that case we’re fucked anyway. Think positive!)

Also: Protests are much less likely to seem hopeless and wasteful if you happen to be in one, especially a banger like Saturday’s We Are All DC rally and march.

The protocol was as per usual — gather, play music, speeches, then line up and march — but more multifocal than most, as it was spread out over the large central elevation of Malcolm X Park; each little group made a cluster, from the unions like UNITE HERE in their bright red shirts to the immigrant-rights crew on their little platform with a generator-driven PA exhorting the crowd in English and Spanish to the bullhorn-bearers marching back and forth leading call and response chants. But it wasn’t a chaos or Babel; the energy that had brought everyone there was the same and held it together.

As marshals got us on the move and we streamed onto 16th Street, I saw young’uns, like the cheerful Georgetown kids who’d piled on the C51 bus with me to get there, and elders dressed nattily as if for an alpine hike, and all ages and types in between — in DC flag capes and home-made protest shirts, bearing signs ranging from sloganeering (PROTECT DC/ HOME RULE) to imperative (DON’T BEND IT LIKE BOWSER) to fanciful (GO-GO NOT PO-PO). There were children, too, like one in bright UNITE red like his gramps, who walked backwards in front of him carrying a drum which the boy solemnly beat with his sticks, and the boys carrying giant inflated submarine sandwiches in honor of the local hero.

For the kids it was fun, and in truth it was fun for the rest of us too. There was music of the mainly percussive variety accompanying our chants and cheers, which bloomed from time to time and from section to section with the same restless and infectious energy of chants and cheers at a baseball game. There was also the tribute of the bells of Foundry United Methodist, raining down peels of support:

We were buoyed — uplifted, you might say — by that, and by the tens of thousands of people we mostly didn’t know but who had the same — well, whatever way you choose to think of it: passion, hobby, predilection, calling, free afternoon — fellow travelers, literally, who had decided not to sit for this, any of this, and took the opportunity of an activist movement to join and show it, to help make it big and loud enough so at least some Americans out there who hadn’t been driven totally mad or feral or fetal by the monsters and their monstrosities could know that they weren’t alone. A pretty good day (though hot!), and a pretty good day’s work.