You can't have our freedom; we're using it.

Danish crown, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen

 
     I grew up in an era of protest. People taking to the streets. First for civil rights, then decrying the Vietnam War. Outrage peaked, and it could be hard to tell if the results were a rally or a riot.
     Actually, not so hard to tell — the looted stores were a giveaway.
     You could argue it worked — civil rights inched forward, the Vietnam War ended.
     You could argue it didn't, really — Nixon resigned in disgrace with the war still going on. It took a new president, and a new era, to finally bring the war in Southeast Asia to a close, nearly seven years after the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention. Civil rights remained elusive.
     As a rule, I don't do protests. I wonder: to what end? There is an essential optimism to protests that I sense is misplaced, a faith that someone is listening, someone cares about your appeal to a higher power, What I call "If only the czar knew." 

     We aren't alerting concerned leaders to troubling situations. We are begging the unhearing. We are wildly gesticulating before the blind. If anything, the social turmoil feeds Trump's plans to break American society — if somebody at a protest steps in a flower bed, he'll justify sending in the Marines.
     Then again, living in a fact-free hellscape between his ears, Trump doesn't even need that. There doesn't have to be a Reichstag fire this time; he can just make it up. "They're eating the dogs; they're eating the cats." American elected the guy who said that; what hope has she now? Facing a human virus custom built to defeat democracy, who can conjure up anything at all, present it as truth and have it accepted. A dishwasher in a Denny's can be branded the head of MS-13 and dragged away to a black op site.
     At best, participating in a protest is like voting — at best, expending considerable effort for tiny effect, to be an ant in a colony. At worst, street theater, a little play you perform in public for yourself.
     "Never confuse movement with action," as Hemingway said.     

     What's so bad about a little movement? A symbolic act of futility? Think how much effort gets wasted on everything else. I seem to have planted tomatoes this year, again, and what good ever comes from that? Sometimes you have to act, and if significant action is not possible, you still do what you can.

     So kudos to everyone showing up at a No Kings rally today. My wife and I are planning to go to one ourselves.  Not because I imagine it will do any good, short term. Or even long term. Or that things will get better anytime soon. They will not. 
     What I want is, when this is all over, to be able to look my granddaughter in the eye and tell her I did what I could. We tried to keep America the decent place which, if always falling short of its promises, at least made those promises. At least pretended to be fair and democratic and open. Not this nest of calculated cruelty, of indifference and fear and tearing down of the regulations, agencies and rules that keep people's lives decent. At least having the hope of decency.
     I see it as an almost physical tug of war. Trump and MAGA world are pulling at our rights, like a mugger trying to yank away a woman's purse. And we're pulling back, crying, "You can't have our freedom — we're using it!"

    I know I said that last concept in the column Friday. It seems worth saying again. And again. And again. Until we don't have to say it anymore.