No Kings: Report from the Rallies

Our family went out today to participate in the No Kings day of protests. We spent the early afternoon in Oak Park, and I went back out to a smaller rally in La Grange later in the afternoon. I’m terrible at estimating, but I’ve seen a claim that 2,500 people were out in La Grange, and Oak Park was much more than that.

During the Bush II years, I attended numerous protests / rallies / marches, many of them antiwar, some of them pro-immigrant, some of them smaller ones protesting candidates being excluded from debates. As best as I can remember, the last time I was at a protest / rally was back in 2010. There’s been plenty to march about over the last 15 years, but a lot of what I had been engaged in had left me burnt out on things like protests.

Protests probably still aren’t my thing, but there were things about today which felt different. And better.

The No Kings idea came out of DJT wanting to hold some sort of military parade. I’ll be honest, I try not to pay very close attention to the infuriating nonsense out of D.C., and so I wasn’t paying much attention to the No Kings thing either.

I’d been thinking recently though about how wrong it felt to be sidelined. A lot of the individual things happening to America today are very much precedented, but the totality of it all is definitely something new, and we can’t just idly accept what’s going down as “the way things are”. Now, you can “refuse to accept” something and still not really know what to do about it, and therefore not do anything at all. I think “acceptance” can be a fuzzy thing in that way. But I don’t accept what’s going down, and I’m sure you don’t either.

One of the qualities of fascism is the systemic suppression of opposition voices. (It should be noted here that such systemic suppression is hardly limited to fascism.) There are a lot of forms this suppression might take, and we’ve all seen a lot of those forms in recent years. In recent years one of the things quieting people has been outright fatigue. There’s been so much to be outraged about that it’s been disorienting. And there’s something about “disagreeing” with people that has changed. I’m cautious about how I say this, because I think a whole lot of people have had their voices suppressed for a long time, but I think the “polarization” of politics is distinctly different. I put “polarization” in quotes because I adamantly reject the idea that there are “two extremes” and “we can’t talk to each other”. If one side believes that people should be equal and the other side disagrees, there’s only one “extreme” there, and we all know it.

As a straight white male with other demographic qualities in my favor, I’m not a likely candidate to feel like I have no voice. But that is how it’s felt in recent times. I meet people and there’s an instinct to hold back on talking about a whole lot of things for fear of… something. And if I feel this way, I can only imagine what it’s like for people who have long been systemically marginalized.

My experience with protests in the past - and specifically larger ones, like antiwar protests - has been that they felt disempowering. We show up, we march, we leave, and then what? A lot of the point of protests is building solidarity, but I would often leave feeling isolated… like what I’d just experienced was fleeting, and once it was over we were disconnected. I rarely had a feeling of momentum.

Today was different, and what made it different, I think, was that people seemed normal, and broadly insistent on finding their voices. Many of the people present made their own signs, more than I’d ever seen at a protest before. And the signs were all over the map in theme and tone. Many of them fit the No Kings theme, but some were specifically anti-ICE, or pro-science, or pro-LGBT, or referenced other administration villains. And it didn’t feel like some kind of marginalized “left” trying to find its voice, but rather “everyday people” trying to find their voices. I saw people I felt like I might see anywhere… and I haven’t tended to think that way before. I mean… Oak Park is one thing, but La Grange, less than a block from our house, was really different. Especially given how many people turned out.

I woke up late this morning, and sat down in the kitchen with coffee, and saw the horrific news out of Minnesota, and I thought about the day ahead and about all of the other things going on in the world, and I just felt frozen. I think I was really dreading going to a protest and potentially leaving it feeling empty.

I don’t feel empty though. I don’t know that I’d say I feel energized, but maybe more something like… affirmed that we’re on course to somehow ending this political nightmare. And I feel like there’s a lot more potential to connect with people. So many of us have felt so disconnected, and that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy to forge those connections, but the people are there and the willingness is there.

We do need better tools. I only found out about the La Grange rally through a local Indivisible group on Facebook. That’s not the way it should still be working, and those kinds of communications limitations are definitely one of the challenges we have. And I think there’s a much broader understanding that we can’t trust traditional mass media to accurately and honestly report on what’s happening. Some of have known this for a long time, but lies about “the liberal news media” seeped into the public consciousness years ago and have been tough to break. Alternative media isn’t doing well these days though, thanks in large part to the likes of Google and Facebook. We need alternative structures more than ever.

That said, with what we do have, I’ve seen pictures from all over the country, and especially all over Illinois. Carbondale. Naperville. Kankakee. Evanston. Rockford. Millions of people across America turned out today and the photos are out there. We don’t need to feel so isolated. These aren’t “extremists” taking to the streets. These are our neighbors. Don’t buy any of the lies. The American people want this administration gone and expect all of the elements of government which are still functional to do everything they can to protect people’s rights.

When this administration does end, there’s going to be a lot of rebuilding to do. And what I saw today gave me hope that people will show up to rebuild. No Kings hasn’t just been a series of protests against something. These are rallies about something - about the idea that there’s something real and meaningful to American democracy, something beyond showing up to vote every so often, and that people are ready and willing to pitch in and do what they can to put the country back on a better course.

We will get through this. We won’t be unscathed, but collectively, we will get through this. We will be hard-pressed, but we will rebuild, and we will move definitively forward. And we will do it without kings.