No Kings protest: Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The glow of the recent No Kings rally still pulsates in my heart. Some 8 million people across the planet took part in over 3,000 separate events – people carrying signs that said things like “Power of Love, not Love of Power,” and “Jesus was a refugee,” and, well . . . “Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS” and “Grab ’em by the midterms.”
Credit to Trump. He wages his wars and struts through life with so much arrogant swagger – so much indifference to politically correct propaganda – that he has made himself the perfect target for what may well be a growing movement to rebuild humanity itself. Oh God, I hope this is the case! Trump is the fool, the bellicose idiot of the moment – in partnership, of course, with Bibi Netanyahu – but they’re only the current faces of the trek to hell and nonexistence we’ve been on for a while.
No Kings is bigger than “no kings.” It’s more than just a movement to reclaim the democracy we used to have (back in the days of George W. Bush, for instance). Yes, it’s a movement in opposition to actions of the Trump administration: the pointless war in Iran and the global economic chaos it has created; the war on immigrants; the invasion, especially of blue cities, by the ICE Gestapo; and, no doubt, people’s ongoing shock and outrage over the Epstein files and the sexual abuse of young girls.
“But voicing opposition is one thing,” as a recent piece in the Christian Science Monitor put it. “Turning it into action is another. The long history of American protests, dating back to the original Boston Tea Party in 1773, shows that not all mass movements produce tangible or lasting results.”
And tangible, lasting results are definitely what the participants want: what we want. And it’s crucial we don’t let this movement go, this movement emerging from “a broad progressive coalition,” according to the article, “with supporters across the country. No Kings organizers include labor unions, such as the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union; veterans organizations, such as Common Defense; environmental groups, such as the League of Conservation Voters; and civil rights groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union.”
As I pushed my wheeled walker through the streets of Appleton last Saturday, feeling an urgent connection with the thousands of people present, I wanted to swaddle the moment in my arms. I knew it was bigger than Donald Trump. I felt like we were crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge – stepping into, and beyond, humanity’s hatred of itself. We were marching not simply for No Kings but for One Planet.
Could this be the civil rights movement rebirthing itself? That movement, of the ’50s and ’60s, wasn’t just about the nation’s great wrongs – the racism, the segregation, the enormous lie that some people are less than human. It pushed against the hatred that had been structured into law and turned into national certainty. The civil rights movement pushed us toward a connected world. It opened the nation’s eyes . . . and soul.
So on Saturday I knew that we marched with open souls. We felt the wrong that’s underway, perpetrated by our country, and turned that wrong, as best we could, into hope. Into love. Love for the children our bombs have murdered. Love for the families ICE has torn apart. Love for the lost refugees whisked to concentration camps.
This is One Planet! We know it on the streets. We will not stop marching until it is known in the halls of Congress. Until it is known in the White House.