No Kings!
Read on a sign: You can’t spell HATRED without RED HAT.
Following the George Floyd murder in 2020, after conservative America began its backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement, Susan and I joined a protest. A few hundred people, mostly college professors, nonprofit workers and retirees, encircled the Gettysburg town square. We held signs and chanted slogans. A dozen white guys stood sentry wearing assault rifles and camouflage. One stood on the roof of his pickup truck, surveying the crowd, I suppose ready to snipe a lib if one got too uppity.
A couple approached us: her – long blonde hair wearing shorts and sandals and a sleeveless tee; him – shirtless, scraggly jeans and combat boots, a semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. “You calling me racist?” He reacted to the sign we brought: Confederate Flags are Racist and Hateful. Sophie made the sign after one of the Confederate rallies on the Gettysburg Battlefield that summer.
We responded with snark: “Are you a Confederate flag?”
“You’re un-American!” This spoken incredulously by his pretty wife.
My unsaid comeback: “There is literally nothing less American than the Confederate flag, the banner of an army at war with America.” I thought this gem up a couple of days later. I neglected to get her phone number so I could text her my zinger when I finally thought one up. This was my last protest, freaked out by the guns and the potential for confrontation with people with guns, I’ve skipped them ever since.
Not that there have been many, until this year, that is. For months now protestors lined the streets on a regular basis taking aim at Trump, Musk and MAGA. I didn’t join in, but I mistakenly drove through it a couple of times, overwhelmed by the chaos, chagrined by leaving the heavy lifting for others. The demonstrative nature of protests felt too public for an introvert like me. The likelihood of confrontation kept me away.
This past week, I asked Susan if she would join me at Gettysburg’s No Kings protest—the nationwide (global?) response to Donald Trump spending forty-billion dollars on a birthday parade for himself. Despite the threat of gun violence, the huge crowd, the realization that I might feel forced to chant slogans or argue with MAGAsters, we showed up. As we walked towards the protest from our car, we watched a family of four exit their own car. The husband donned his Civil War officer cavalry hat and adjusted the pistol holstered on his hip.
But we didn’t bail. We joined the crowd. We didn’t bring signs or flags. We just supplied our bodies and bolstered the crowd which was estimated at two thousand people. When the protest ended, promptly at one o’clock, Susan and I walked into one of the shops on the square. That’s when I realized how stressed I was. My chest hurt from the excess adrenaline flooding my veins.
Read on a sign: Two of Donald Trump’s wives were immigrants. Proof that only immigrants do the work that no Americans are willing to do.
We only saw that one gun. Confrontation was minimal. One guy walked through the crowd shouting “Boo! Boooo!” as his wife and sons followed behind looking mortified, and a guy in a pickup slowed down to give us the finger and scream “Fuck you!”
I wonder if others felt the distress I did. I’m sure many loved it, standing in a crowd of likeminded people in a county that cast sixty-seven percent of their votes for Donald Trump. I’m just pissed that this is necessary. The need to push back against the notion that hardworking immigrants are illegal, that disabled people on Medicaid are freeloaders, that Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax is an existential threat. The cliff seems insurmountable. I’m forced to participate. I’d rather just write.
To those of you who participated in No Kings protests, I salute you. To quote my main man Bob Marley: “Don’t give up the fight.”
Read on a sign: Protest is Patriotic.
