No Kings: Wildly successful!

Saturday’s No Kings protest went about as well as I could have hoped for! Not just in Dallas, but nationwide. Early estimates are that anywhere from 4 million to 12 million people showed up across the country. That’s an outstanding turnout! I read that in Boston, the Pride parade merged with the No Kings parade and there were an estimated 1 million people on Boston Common, which seems like an insane number of people to be gathered in one place.

Doc, Kathryn, Chris, and I (Jamie elected to stay home this time) went to the downtown Dallas protest, along with approximately 10,000 of our closest friends. The mood was passionate, determined, and peaceful. Everyone I saw and talked to was so kind, supportive, enthusiastic, and very much, “I cannot believe we are still having to do this shit, but here we are, so let’s make it count.”

At least one person was offering sunscreen, allergy meds, and ibuprofen to anyone who needed them. Two separate people gave me a little American flag from stacks that they were carrying to hand out. I saw other people handing out free water, buttons, posterboard and markers, t-shirts, and hats.

And the City of Dallas is flying the Pride flag downtown, I was pleased to see!

The speakers from the stage announced that if anyone encountered someone trying to stir up some shit, to just calmly walk away without engaging, as it was very important that this remain a peaceful protest. However, we walked the whole perimeter of the demonstration site and didn’t see any MAGA or other counter-protestors. Like, not a single one. Perhaps the gravity of what their Dear Leader is doing to our country is beginning to get through to them.

Paula Poundstone was our celebrity speaker in Dallas (or as my autocorrect accidentally referred to her on the group chat later, “PayPal Poundstone”) and I couldn’t hear a single word she said because there were so many people there and we were a ways back from the stage, but you can listen to her here.

And then when the speakers were done, we marched. Lots of honking, cheering, people way up on balconies or hanging out of windows of tall buildings with their own signs, waving and yelling and supporting. Again, I did not see a single person counterprotesting along the route.

I decided not to take photos this year, other than a couple of selfies/ussies, because I don’t want to potentially show anyone’s face who doesn’t want to be identified. There were so many super-creative signs, though! Many of them, including my own, were not particularly polite. I think a lot of us are just done being polite.

We took a lot of security precautions, because we just weren’t sure what would happen, given 🍊🤡🧩💩’s liberal use of the National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles, and the fact that the Texas governor put the National Guard on alert here. Would it be peaceful, like previous protests? Would there be police and SWAT and the National Guard everywhere, looking for an excuse to get violent? I was nervous about going, but told myself, “This is critically important. What will happen, will happen. You are smart and you have contingency plans. You have the built in privilege of being white, and you’re going to use that to speak up for others. You’ll be on alert and looking around and noting the mood of the crowd. You’ll go and you’ll use your privilege and risk your own safety because it’s quite literally that important.”

I think our preparations were smart, and I want to write them down here in case we need them for future protests. Thankfully we didn’t have to use any of these.

• We gave Jamieson the “What to do if your parents get arrested while supporting democracy” talk (if he hadn’t heard from us by an agreed-upon time, he knew who to call to ask for help)
• We enlisted friends who weren’t marching as a backup plan to care for our child should we not come home for some reason
• We drilled into our heads to ask for a lawyer and shut the fuck up, should we get detained
• I took FaceID off of my phone and changed my phone passcode to something much longer
• I wrote emergency phone numbers in Sharpie on my forearm
• I carried no bags, just the minimal necessary items in my pockets: hat, car key, phone, ID, cash, sunscreen, ear plugs, N95, a granola bar, and water bottle on a carabiner clipped to my belt
• I wore sturdy waterproof shoes
• We put our protest signs on hinged black matteboards that we could fold up and carry plain-side-out if we needed to be low-key
• We developed agreements for
  • where to find each other if everything was peaceful but we got separated
  • what to do if any crazy shit went down (each individually get ourselves to the train as best we can and meet back at our home station)
  • what to do if shit went down and we couldn’t go north where the trains are (head east and we picked a restaurant a mile away to meet up at)

Meanwhile, 🍊🤡🧩💩 ’s sad little $25M+ birthday parade was just that… pretty sad. Sparsely attended, bad weather, soldiers sometime just walking instead of neatly marching in formation (perhaps their own form of protest?), and 🍊🤡🧩💩 himself looked like a bored, petulant child hoping it would all be over soon. I’m not going to write any more than that about it — he doesn’t deserve any more of my brainspace or attention.

I don’t think this is the last time that we are going to have to protest. But I feel pretty good about what happened at this one; it leaves me with some hope.