All this past week the same vapid essay has been showing up repeatedly in my social media feeds, put there by an assortment of people most of whom likely had only the best of intentions. “I’m not going to go to the No Kings protest,” it said. “And neither should you.” Huh. Didn’t realize I needed permission from some internet stranger to go about my day but there you have it. Consider me notified. If you haven’t read the piece, I’ll spare you the trouble. The author claims, no doubt sincerely, to have attended several of the No Kings protests only to discover that in the wake of this experience the world had not magically been altered. There were no rainbows and unicorns, the bad guys still existed and held power, and the thought – the very idea – of doing this again without the immediate resolution of those issues seemed dystopian, futile, and just intolerable. They have given up on these protests and would very much like you to do so as well. Instead they have an agenda that they insist you follow that will indeed produce the rainbows and unicorns that the No Kings protest so far have not! So spare yourself the wasted energy, dear reader, and obey your worldly correspondent. Yeah, no. Such maunderings are what you get from people who don’t understand the long game and who don’t really understand the point of the protests at all, and the defeatism embodied in that essay is exactly what is necessary for those in power to continue unimpeded. Tyrants depend on mass submission. There are more of us than there are of them, and the mere fact that this is demonstrated – that masses of people are willing to get out and let people know that they oppose this tyranny – is an important thing in itself. Not everyone is in a position to protest, and the No King rallies serve the useful function of reminding those people that they are not alone. That others agree with them. That this is in fact a popular movement and they should not despair. Even if that is all this accomplishes right now, that in itself is a worthwhile achievement because opposition dies in isolation. We are here. We will not go away. And when the current protest ends and nothing seems to have changed, there will be another one. Because nothing is going to change overnight. There will be no big reveal after which the rainbows and unicorns will be brought out of the wings to take center stage. This is a war of attrition, of incremental victories and hopeless stands that can only be validated in retrospect. It is worth shouting into the wind just to be heard, because that sets the stage for the next round and the one after that and the one after that and even a brick wall will wear away to nothing in time. Opposition movements focused on short-term victories tend not to survive. C.S. Lewis once wrote that in Shakespeare’s King Lear there is a very minor character – unnamed, with less than a dozen lines – who sees the blinding of Gloucester and draws his sword against those who perpetrated this deed because even if he does not understand the larger machinations of the plot he sees what is in front of him and will not stand for it. He does not succeed in stopping it or even punishing the guilty and he is murdered almost immediately, but Lewis said of him that “if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.” This is what Ken Taylor describes as defiant resignation – acting despite the understanding that it won’t change anything, simply to demonstrate your unhappiness with the world as it stands and your belief that it should change. That in itself is a worthwhile thing, perhaps not immediately but later. And sometimes you have to do these things just because they need to be done, whether anything larger comes out of them at all, because it’s what you have to do for yourself. A.J. Muste protested against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, holding a candle in front of the White House, often alone. Do you think you’re going to change the policies of the US by doing this, he was asked. “Oh, I don’t do this to change the country,” he said. “I do this so the country won’t change me.” You need to be able to say to yourself and to those who come later that you were not silent in the face of evil. That you spoke up. That you did not let it pass. That you joined with others or stood alone but either way you were not silenced. Kim and I went to the No Kings protest today here in Our Little Town. I have no idea how many other people where there – I am notoriously terrible at estimating crowd sizes. Several hundred at least. Kim thinks it might have been as many as a thousand. A good-sized crowd on a cold and blustery day, at any rate. We carried our signs and raised our voices, and there were speakers and singers and most of the cars driving by honked in approval and we went away knowing that we had not been silent and that there were a lot of people here in Our Little Town who agree with us – unlike previous protests, there were no counter-protesters that I saw, which is perhaps a sign that even the hardcore MAGA folks are starting to question things. As of this writing there are still no rainbows and unicorns, and my country is still ruled by a child rapist desperate to cover up his sex crimes with war crimes, surrounded by a corrupt and spineless mob of cosplaying white supremacist toadies inflicting their shortcomings on an unwilling world. So we will return for the next protest, and the next, until either they come to an end or we do. And if that bothers the essayist, well, I can live with that.
