Thus Always to Tyrants

Saturday was a nippy spring day in Kansas City. The early spring warmth had been tampered by rain and cold this past week. Getting to the park where the rally was happening was a bit of a trek. The late morning sun did get a chance to peek through the overcast sky, and as the rays hit me as BEB and I moved through the streets, I got to muse about using a personal vehicle to get there. The weight of planning—even for a low-stakes action—for protesting—walking or public transit is preferred, but of course there’s a lack of public transit, and if the protest is far, how else do you get there? Uber? That seems antithetical. So I rationalized it by parking a few blocks away. It was clear from several blocks away that traffic was already slowed. The sidewalks were filled with people holding signs and flags. As the incline in the road as the car moved down the street, the crowd became evident. 

There was mass action Saturday. Protests sprung up all over the country. Seeing the collective anger was soul-filling. Anger is such a fickle emotion. It’s taboo to be angry outwardly—less so as a man—nonetheless, anger is not an emotion to express publicly. Anger is private. Anger sits in a cage for most people. Like the tiger enclosure at the zoo. It is meant to be controlled, observed, and restrained. Not meant to be let out into the public. I concur with the sentiment. As a man who has worked on anger through therapy and my own journey in life, living in anger is a dubious luxury that can be ill-afforded. When you’re public, even if you are angry, there is an understood social contract that you keep that shit to yourself. You shout-whisper to your partner about what has made you irate. You are allowed to be passive-aggressive to a point; if you’re not careful, this can go too far, and then while your anger might not come up outright, you can come off as socially inept. When you see someone in public red faced, spittle drying on the sides of their mouth, berating a service worker or family member, it isn't long before someone steps in to appease that person and calm them down enough to diffuse the situation. Those are the moments when the tiger escapes. Released into public, it causes destruction. Terrorizes everyone within earshot. Those poor souls left to fend for themselves with a beast. Yet, if that tiger were to move from a zoo back to the jungles of India or Nepal, it would not be faulted for that tiger to be out in the open, hunting prey through the trees. Its ferocity is not questioned. It is not asked to be respectable. 

I wasn’t sure what to expect as we drove into the downtown area designated as the Anger Zone. Are people as angry as me? Does the average person feel the gnawing pains of justice, finally? Did the bloodletting and hatchet swings to bedrocks of our national institutions finally strike close enough for people? Attempting to dismantle the Department of Education, gutting Social Security, fracturing veteran care, and embracing Nazi symbols. The new regime has taken a chainsaw through the foundations of the social safety net that has been institutionalized since the 1930s and reaffirmed for decades before my lifetime. I have long joked about not getting to see my Social Security because I cannot remember an election cycle where it was not at some point of contention because it was going bankrupt. 

As a child of, nephew of, and best friend with veterans, I see the cleaves to veteran services that I know are already far from sufficient services. So much so that both my mother and father swore off using the VA. My mom, I remember well, after a report of VA patients being given infected blood transfusions. Stretching back to every American war, American soldiers have languished once returning home. Lack of job opportunities, trauma - physically and psychologically for many over the last 60 years as they were sent to fight and die in imperialist struggles over capitalism and oil have cost several generations tens of thousands of young men and women. Republicans have long positioned themselves as champions of veterans. Though neither party has ever done enough, to see flagrant disregard for those who signed up to defend America from the party championing “America First” is jaw-dropping.

For a long time, it has felt like I was a part of a small minority of people who could see the writing on the wall that the coalescing encroachment of dystopian futures. The small circle I have cultivated for myself felt like we were outcasts like Chicken Littles, knowing the die was cast long before we had a chance to effect change. I turned 30 this week. My birthday present from the country of birth is the third (or fourth depending on whose measures) economic crisis of my lifetime. The second of my adult life. Depends on how you see the Dot Com bubble and if you count the pandemic. Not to mention Wars on Terror, Drugs, Immigration. The running joke among millennials is that we would finally enjoy some precedented times as moment after moment presented to us is unprecedented; at least that’s what we were told, and now it’s what I know. I oscillate between this has never happened before and this has happened since the dawn of the country. Boom and bust cycles are a natural part of the capitalist system. My sincere interest in history has taught me that is the nature of the beast. The Machine creates and finds a product and in rapid succession, looks to maximize profit on the widget and minimize costs. Competition spurs innovation. Consumers dictate winners and losers in the market. At least in theory, the calculations since the beginning of the market economy and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations seem to conveniently miss greed as inherent to the nature of humans. Not that all of us are misers, but in order to maximize profit, you have to have a complete monopoly. You have to do anything in the name of profits. Blood spilled, wars fought, ecosystems decimated—all in the name of the Almighty Dollar. That in order to have some, you need to make sure someone has none.

The fortuitousness of the Switch 2 being announced the day the president signed his protectionist, isolationist tariffs is something to behold. Maybe that is the thing that shocks people into consciousness. There was word from some talking heads that "access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream”—which is true! The American Dream™ was about being able to live comfortably—owning a house, working a 9-5; if you wanted more, you could have more.

That was washed away with waves and waves of free trade agreements, which saw good-paying jobs that overwhelmingly people don’t want to work as the country becomes more educated shipped overseas. Where lower wages and less regulation existed, regimes were kept from toppling by arming resistance to workers movements the world over. Using tariffs as an economic weapon. Tariffs, the stuff we used to learn about as the first lesson on Revolutionary War America. Boston Tea Party and Smoot-Hawley were mandatory learning in 7th & 8th grade history, 10th Grade Economics, 11th grade US history. This 1-2 combo was a substantial part of 4 out of 6 years of learning. There’s the famous clip from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

Which does a great job of distilling public education in America into a few short moments but highlights Smoot-Hawley! In the Era of Free Trade, this is asinine thinking! It was asinine in the 1930s and led to the Great Depression. All of this is a well-established economic principle, and you can disagree, but the matter and form are still at issue.

Every time a law firm or university trips over themselves to bend the knee to the new regime, this is what they enable. You can’t appease Nazis. You can’t compromise with fascists. There is not enough money gained, land conquered, or pain inflicted that can fill the hole that the people in power have inside of them. 

Saturday, as I stood pridefully side by side with my wife and over a thousand other people for yet another day trying to drag our government to the ideals it has long purported to be, I couldn't help but let my mind wander to the potential harms that may come. It wasn’t that long ago that I was marching with my teachers as they went on strike when I was a senior in high school, and there wasn’t a passing thought to the harm that could come at the protest. Yes, I had known about the potential for conflict, but it was largely about controlling the message to win support for our teachers’ cause. 

This time things are different, in part because Kansas and Missouri are conservative states with open carry and conceal carry laws that allow for weapons to be accessed freely; and in the same vein, there are more people who agree with the regime than don’t. At least by the measure of the votes in the last election. There is also the much more present danger of just being flat run over at protests now. Not sure that it is new, but it has received much wider news coverage in all sorts of attacks on people. It was soul-affirming to see the old and young. Trans, cis, Black, white, veterans, retirees, and every other walk of life out on the sidewalks holding signs, all advocating for their reason for being there.

Fuck Trump

Billionaires are the Problem

Save Social Security

Protect Our Vets

Free Palestine

No Fascists - No Kings

Each person I had the chance to catch the eye of or talk to conveyed the hopefulness we all have been desperately looking for. Each of us is no longer alone in our collective anger. We were given a place to chant and curse and let the fear flow out of us like rapids in flooded tributaries. The weather’s balm was nothing for the fever of freedom. 

Part of the purpose of protest is to combat the loneliness that can occur when you begin the fight for a better world. I’ve repeatedly called attention to the fire that I have inside of myself—this fire exists in all of us. It waxes and wanes with the tides of time. Not for everyone and not the same way for everyone, but most cannot constantly be a raging inferno; life dampens it, we dampen it in our complacency, but this moment has shown that it is not only my own or my circle's own righteous anger. Estimates had turn out across the country at close to 2% of the population had shown up from coast to coast to in unison say enough is enough.

All of this self-commending almost wasn’t realized. Early on, maybe 20 or so minutes after we arrived, and the crowd was beginning to swell when it came to a crashing halt when a man and woman tried to run over one protester and then hopped out of his lifted F-150.

The organizers, for their part, did their best, and the most important thing was making noise and making sure everyone stayed safe, but the turnout crowded the meeting point. Instead of taking the streets, protesters were lined on the sidewalks surrounding a park and the corners of the intersecting streets. I was reminded of a friend of mine at “march” in law school, and I say “march” because we walked the sidewalks from the university through the town and circled all the way back. She quipped, “Walking on sidewalks isn’t a march; this is just a group stroll,” which is a cynical view—but important to think about. I held the belief that if we were in the streets and had shut them down, there would be no opportunity for bad actors to use vehicles to harm demonstrators. 

I’ve seen talk from leftists and liberals about the nature of protest and cringe. I have battled my own circle on defeatist attitudes. If I say there are Nazis in the White House, and you say there always have been—I don't disagree with you—but is this the moment where we need to deal with the nuances? Instead of worrying about brunch or how Citizens United has unfairly tipped the scales of elections to the wealthy and powerful, can we focus on the swaths of people that have become activated? We have people who want better. The ideas we have long been championing on The Left for over a half century have a chance to reach more people. No longer confined to the highfalutin halls of academic circles and cynical pages of anarchist zines, we can create a coalition of people to build a better tomorrow. It is white leftists, at a minimum, responsibility to begin to educate the white masses that are joining us arm in arm who have not previously been active or have defected. This moment gives us a chance to say the old way, the status quo, wasn’t working for you, me, or 99% of the country. If we do universal healthcare and raise education levels. We don't have to sacrifice anything for Black and brown people to receive the same. The has been artificially shrunk, and you have been indoctrinated into hating people who do not affect your chance at the American Dream™ as we had been told for generations.

I don’t have the answers. I do think that encouraging people to protest, to be active in their communities, and begin to understand the moment in history we live in is a helluva lot more than we have had for some time in this country. There have been flare-ups for most of my adult life—Occupy Wall Street, Mike Brown, Trump 1, George Floyd, and the Palestine University protests—all bubbling up the resentments of a growing number of people asking for the promises of America to be realized for all. Now, this time, it feels different—to me. More and more people are being directly impacted by the rollback of the social safety net. While I have no quarter for Republicans in power or sympathy for those who voted against their own interests, I do have empathy for my fellow humans, so much so that if cringe #resist folks are willing to join me on the lines with Comrade Kristol, who am I to deny them? The time at protests when we’re all together is the time to talk about how to continue the momentum in the long, hot summer ahead. 

What is “cringe” is not important; how someone goes about their activism is not important. Actively fighting fascism is what is important. I am not sure what happens between now and the weekend, let alone the 2026 midterms. All we can do is continue to build community by helping mutual aid funds or abortion funds, showing our disapproval of the regime at protests, and learning about how to protect people from being kidnapped and whisked away to concentration camps. It is going to get worse before it gets better, but we aren't hapless in the meantime. No Justice, No Peace, No Nazis, No KKK, No Fascist USA.