Out In the Street
When I’m out in the street, I walk the way I want to walk. When I’m out in the street, I talk the way I want to talk — Bruce Springsteen
Wait. Wait. Wait. I know. Time-adjusted for the pace of incoming, massive news stories in the Trump 2.0 era, Saturday was about four thousand years ago. But let’s not move past the story of the No Kings protest just yet. It was a big deal. And it was a long time coming. During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who lost his whole family in the Holocaust before crawling on his hands and knees through mud and snow into the Polish forest, where he would live and fight the Nazis for the next four years) and I were walking toward a restaurant, and he expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. It was one of many times he questioned: “Vhy aren’t people marching in the streets?” I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, ‘You think when I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?” It’s not that my dad saw an impending Holocaust in America. He was the least hysterical person I’ve ever known. But having witnessed them firsthand, he recognized the signs of authoritarianism, he understood how history could turn on a dime, and knew that global trends that once seemed like distant news stories could land at your doorstep. So he would’ve been relieved to see millions and millions of Americans out in the streets over the weekend. Not because a few protests will solve every problem. But because it shows that we’re awake to the challenge we face. And for those who witnessed the marches, the alienation of waking each morning to a deluge of bad news was replaced by a reminder that we are anything but alone.
+ Here are some photos from the protests from NPR, the NYT, AP, and The Atlantic.
+ Trump responded to the protests by ordering ICE to step up deportation efforts in Democrat-run cities. So no one should overstate the power of the protests to move White House policies. But neither should we underestimate the power of the protests to unify the opposition and to shape public opinion. Josh Marshall: “These are horrid, degenerate comments, a pledge of domestic war against America’s own great cities and their right to govern themselves. But Trump is also losing this fight in the one forum that matters, the battle over public opinion.” (And like the marches over the weekend, that battle will be fought one step at a time.)
