A Hopeful Saturday

"Hope will never be silent."

-Harvey Milk

Overcast and 64 with a little mist. Welcome to the second half of June in upstate NY. One could get used to this.

After months of rather dark topics here, a bit if sunshine this weekend. Peg and I can now say we've gone to our first protest.

Saturday morning arrived with skies threatening rain as I scanned the No Kings website to find which protest among the dozens in our area we should attend. For those who missed out, the gatherings were staggered in time from around nine in the morning into the mid-afternoon. We chose Fairport New York, not so much because it's a lovely town filled with historic buildings draped along the old Erie Canal, but because its 10 a.m. start time allowed for a leisurely breakfast and a few minutes to pull out the posterboard I'd purchased the day before to make signs. So after eggs, coffee, and a little Portuguese vinho verde, we were on our way up through rolling farmland and into Fairport, which has become sort of a bedroom community of Rochester. I counted maybe a half dozen No Kings protests around greater Rochester on the map. This would likely be one of the smallest.

So imagine our surprise when we pulled onto Church Street a few minutes after the scheduled start to find several thousand people lining both sides of the street for a couple miles, cheering and waving as horns honked and heads poked out of sunroofs with signs depicting DJT in all sorts of unflattering caricatures.

We found a side street to park, and took up our spot amidst educators, retirees, military veterans and the whole milieu of western New York folks.

It turned out that ours was a popular spot on the route, because we had the King Himself right next to us.

One could feel this wave of relief, of hope, as thousands upon thousands of our neighbors came together to say our country is so much better than this, that the pain since November we've endured alone or only among those close to us has been shared by a huge swath of this country. Peg and I both looked at each other, smiled, and teared up a little at the spectacle.

That almost no one showed up for his birthday party later in the day, as the troops engaged in a time-honored act of passive resistance by refusing to march in step past the dais, just made Saturday all the sweeter.

And the band selected "Fortunate Son" to play at that moment. Brilliant! A protest song by a veteran of the Vietnam era raging at a country that allows the privileged to stay home and grow wealthier while us suckers and losers go do the nation's dirty work. Sound familiar, Cadet Bone Spurs?

Of course, last night he was doubling down on social media, basically declaring war on places run by Democrats and promising more scenes of armed goons attacking our neighborhoods. But you have to figure that display of invective on his spittle-soaked keyboard is a sign that he sees the writing on the wall, that he actually noticed several million people taking to the streets on their day off to stand together against what he and his MAGA creatures are trying to do to this country, our country.

So expect more trouble ahead, but perhaps some of it will be, as John Lewis put it, "good trouble".