What does democracy look like?
It’s the 7 million Americans who peacefully took to the streets in Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies all across our country — in our cities as well as our small rural towns. The millions who exercised their right to free speech clearly demonstrated how protest is foundational to our democracy.
The orderly rallies made a mockery of attempts by the president to characterize those who engage in protest as America haters and violent Antifa terrorists. The closest sign of any of this were the gray-haired women who carried signs saying, I’m Aunt Tifa.
In Haines, we silently marched from Tlingit Park to downtown, led by flag-bearing veterans. Prior to marching, we gathered at the park, as a readers’ theater group recited the words of famous Americans who, in previous generations, inspired ordinary citizens to speak up against injustice. Real change, historian Howard Zinn had written during the Vietnam era, has to work its way from the bottom up.
For most Americans, the rallies should serve as a wake-up call. Hopefully, more will start to notice that our president’s politics of revenge against people and institutions he perceives as enemies is nothing more than a smokescreen — diverting our attention away from the real issues that affect our lives. While he is loudly being vengeful and scapegoating marginalized groups, he is quietly ignoring our health care needs, the high cost of living and the lack of affordable housing — caring instead about huge tax breaks for billionaires.
George Figdor