Why We Drag Our Asses to the Protests

 

I don’t want to overstate the importance of protest demonstrations. Their immediate impact on the problems of the day is never likely to be more than negligible, while their long-term impact is unknowable.

But I don’t want to understate their importance, either.

I’ve now been to five protests — two aimed at a Tesla dealership, three aimed at the junta more generally — and I was ambivalent about all of them. Were it not for my wife’s strong feelings on the subject, I probably wouldn’t have gone.

I realize I was being selfish. Surely I wasn’t the only one thinking there are better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon. But the ones who showed up pushed past that, so who was I to excuse myself from a civic responsibility?

As it turned out, the simple act of showing up came with unexpected benefits. What the protests may have lacked in political effectiveness, they made up for in psychic income. Our collective mental health has taken a beating of late, and there’s comfort in sheer numbers, in embracing causes even if they seem futile.

And so, last Saturday, we drove fifteen minutes to Troy, Michigan, for what was billed as “May Day,” a “National Day of Action.” Spoiler alert: There wasn’t much action.

It was purportedly a protest against attacks on working people, which are indeed substantial and ongoing. But I think the real driver lies on the other side of the double-entendre — “Mayday,” as in “M’aidez,” as in “Help me,” as in “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” — which is how most of the protesters felt.

There is something heartening about being among hundreds of strangers, all of whom are outraged, all of whom feel more-or-less as you do, all of whom want to feel like they’re doing something, anything, to turn back this tsunami of vileness.

This was the second such protest at the same major intersection, and people were lined up on both sides of both streets, with some of the lines stretching the length of two football fields. Virtually everyone carried a sign, mostly homemade, mostly expressing rage. My favorite: “Prevent Truth Decay.”

The protests are designed mostly with passing cars in mind, and there is no shortage of cars out on a Saturday. Most of those who drive through the intersection will honk in solidarity. Some pretend they don’t see us. Some drive by in Teslas, looking embarrassed. Sometimes a huge semi will deafen us with an air horn, which always draws cheers. And occasionally some Trumpy will flip us the finger.

Speaking of Trumpies, on this particular Saturday we were treated to an organized contingent of five brainwashed nincompoops. All depressingly young, they marched down our line carrying three brand new, slickly-manufactured Trump flags. The flags were larger than our signs, and they waved above us, which must have made an odd sight to the passing motorists — Trump flags sticking out among the Trump haters. Nobody was fooled.

This was an obvious provocation, but we’d all been advised not to engage with nincompoops, and there was, in truth, no real menace to their presence. They were more annoying than anything, but they were a timely reminder of why we were all there. Not that we needed one.

Oddly, one of their number, a young woman with a dog, carried a sign that read, of all things, “No Privatization.” Of all the hundreds of heartfelt pleas being displayed on signs in Troy that day, this one was truly unique. While ‘privatization’ was surely a long word for a Trump voter, she probably should have paid a little more attention to its definition.

Does she know that the sentiment she’s expressing runs sharply counter to Republican dogma? Does she know that Trump will surely privatize anything he can get away with — prisons, schools, police forces, nuclear missile sites — as long as he gets his skim off the top? As a presumably loyal Trump supporter, how can she possibly be protesting privatization?

Either she was committing the sort of heresy that attracts death threats in MAGA world — and committing it in the very shadow of three Trump flags — or she’s just another brainless twit who’s about to find out how much of her life was made in China and will soon be priced out of her reach.

But I digress. As the protest moved into its second hour, I couldn’t help noticing that there were few, if any, Black faces among us. This was true at all the Troy protests, and I suspect Troy itself bears some of the blame for that.

A sprawling suburb with neither a downtown nor a discernible personality, Troy owes its very existence to “white flight,” that mass exodus of white people from the city of Detroit in the wake of the “race riots” of the late sixties. To an up-and-coming auto executive of that time, Troy offered an affordable home, a manageable commute, and a place where his family would be well out of reach of “those people,” who lived only to collect welfare and violate white women.

The bigotry is no longer as overt as it once was, but the undercurrents remain. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised if Black people don’t feel welcome in Troy. Fortunately, they show up elsewhere.

But if I look beyond Michigan to the sheer number of protests — some in places where they’ve never seen a Democrat, let alone an immigrant — I can see a collective will starting to take shape. We’re just starting to feel it, an insistent reminder of the high stakes involved. It demands courage, which we all know can be hard to summon.

But we’ll need that courage going forward. As Trump grows more demented, and more cornered, he will throw up Hail-Mary executive orders, and they’re sure to be doozies. Remember, Trump always gets worse, never better, and he never hits bottom.

So there could be more serious protests in our future — national strikes, nurses’ strikes, teachers’ strikes, general strikes — a whole menu of activist actions that have been used in other countries, often to great effect.

Those countries have all learned — the hard way — that there is strength in the collective, as long as the collective can stay strong. We’ll have to see about that.

But as the protests keep growing, it’s becoming quite clear that we’re just getting our feet wet.