No Kings, the Second Time Around |
Image by Bradley Andrews.
Yes, in the ever more ominously unsettled (dis-)United States of Donald J. Trump, I recently went to the “hate America” rally in New York City. Or at least that’s what Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson insisted it was. Who knew that so unbelievably many Americans, millions of us across the United States, would “hate” this country enough to go out and march in the recent No Kings demonstrations, even in places where we might have feared being in distinct danger from the troops of “our” president?
In the days before the latest No Kings demonstrations, no matter whom I talked to or where they lived, they seemed to be planning to go to their local version of that march/rally. My neighbors, other city people, suburbanites, even friends living in the countryside. And despite the people I knew who had marched in the first round of No Kings rallies, as I did, that wasn’t true then. This time, just about everybody turned out, or so it seemed!
Oh, wait! I suddenly thought of someone who wasn’t there. Oops, let me take that back. He was there, he just didn’t know it. He was on sign after sign after sign, doing this, doing that, doing the inconceivable — or do I mean, sadly enough, the all-too-conceivable?
Take this one that I copied down, for example:
“Tyrant
Rapist
Usurper
Madman
Pedophile”
And I’m sure you know just what the first letters of those five words spell out!
“Only Butterflies Should Become Monarchs”
For me, that march began not at 50th Street and Seventh Avenue where I came out of the subway, but at the subway platform uptown where I was waiting to get on a train to the march. I suddenly noticed that the elderly woman (and I say that advisedly as an elderly man) standing next to me was carrying a handmade sign — the first of literally thousands I would see that day — that said, “No dictators/no kings” and, when I asked her about it, she promptly replied, “I would have called Trump a cunt, but he lacks the depth and warmth.”
I finally made it off that subway train with literally hundreds of other soon-to-be protesters and ever so slowly managed to make my way up the packed stairs onto an instantly packed Seventh Avenue at the edge of New York’s Times Square. At least as far as I could tell, President Trump wasn’t there himself, preparing to march down Seventh Avenue in his old hometown of New York City with staggering numbers of other New Yorkers and me. News reports, based on police estimates, suggested that “more than 100,000” of us in my hometown and “nearly seven million” Americans in “more than 2,700” demonstrations nationwide actively protested — and when it comes to anti-Trump demonstrations, those doing the........