By the way, the Tea Party movement used the strategy and techniques of Saul Alinsky and other liberal organizers to grow their ranks. We need to get back to actually having a strategy, because we used to be really good at this!
Fort Lauderdale checking in. We had a lot of local protests - easily a half dozen within 30 min drive. So we didn’t get the huge numbers we could have, but I think it was good to lower the bar for people to get to one.
I went to one at the beach. We were a little worried that traffic could get bad - traffic gets funneled over the draw bridge to get there. And we wanted a way to get out if needed. So we left the car at a big park about 2 miles away, and rode our bikes to a shopping mall just inland from the bridge. Walked the rest of the way.
The first thing I saw was American flags flying, and for a second I was concerned that it was a counter protest. Happily, no - they were with us. Then I saw a frog. And just started taking it all in. The energy was so good, I almost cried in happiness.
Cars driving by with signs of their own, honking at us.
One of my favorite protestors was a little boy, maybe 10 years old, with his parents. He was proudly carrying a sign with a picture of the planet earth, reading something like “Keep your hands off my future.”
We also had a penguin, and a pilgrim.
Everything was well organized, and I felt completely safe.
Newspaper articles estimated 2500 people at this site.
I’m very glad I went.
Yeah, that really ticks me off. And it’s yet another sign of the hold he has on people that most in the military support him to the point that when a highly respected general, for one, quotes Trump saying this sort of thing, they decide the general is lying.
Theanks, she was pretty wonderful. She badly wanted to join the WACs but got rejecting because she was only 4’9. She was heartbroken but decided to do the next best thing. She worked both jobs six days a week for 21/2 years. She couldn’t have had more than 5 hours of sleep a night during that time. She said she befriended aother worker, a Black woman who’d moved from the South to get a defense industry job, and they’d take turns napping during coffee and dinner breaks on the cot in the women’s room. One would nap while the other was the alarm clock. Strong women.
I’ve thought about that, too. It wasn’t the case with my mom, as she continued working at Sears HQ after her marriage. She met Dad there when he was home on leave. He’d worked in the trafficking deoartment while attending law school at night. It affected many women, though. The mother of a childhood friend rose to an executive level during the war. When I knew her, she was a SAHM with 4 kids. I wonder now if her constant cleaning (The immaculate house smelled of Lysol.was due to frustrated drive.
No, I understood that. My sistrer is crippled by arthritis and is slow even with a walker but got to the Chicago protest last summer. This year she was in too much pain to go. I yelled twice as loud because I was yelling for two. 
There were quite a few here, but all very well behaved. Last summer one wore a sign that read, “I can shit better policies than Trump has.”
I just felt frustrated and depressed, like I lived in Pompeii in 79 CE and everyone was doing laundry and casually shopping while Vesuvio was flinging the occasional rock. The protests at least felt like I was doing something. Yet I’m afraid of sticking my neck out too far because I have a family member who works for the feds and could lose their job. We’ve stopped discussing politics on the phone due to this.
Parania strikes deep.
Into your life it will creep.
It starts when you’re always afraid.
Step out of line, the man comes
and takes you away.
I’ve reasoned that I’ve been openly involved in progressive work for at least fifteen years. If they want to smear me or punish me, the evidence of my advocacy is already out there. Refraining from protest now isn’t going to save me. But protesting now just might save me.
There were over 1,000 people at the protest in our little town yesterday, a place that has under 10,000 population. It was loud with lots of positive energy.
It was amusing to check the comments on the local newspaper’s site and see the old racists lamenting how their town has changed. Those days are definitely over here.
Much as I admire the man for his statuesque manly man build, I can’t help but notice that his right ear has not a hint of a manly man’s assassination attempt survivor’s bullet scar.
Can we make the tiny scab a bit bigger?
I am reminded of a quote from the author, Terry Pratchett. He wrote a series of books in which a fiercely independent tribe called the Nac Mac Feegles, or The Wee Free Men. They, with their Scottish accents, would chant:
“ Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna’ be fooled again!”
That would make a great protest sign!
That’s fantastic! Love it!
Favorite sign from the Lansing, MI protest:
YOU SUCKED IN HOME ALONE 2”.
That’s a thing of beauty.
Here are some more pictures from the NPR website.
Photos: Scenes from the No Kings Protests
https://www.npr.org/sections/the-picture-show/2025/10/18/nx-s1-5577704/photos-no-kings-protests
The public supports the side that looks less violent. We have the contrast between masked ICE agents throwing people to the ground and guys in chicken suits.
Progress slowed in the civil rights movement when non-violent civil disobedience turned into long hot summers.
She may or may not have thought so. When my sister had graduated school, she offered to stay home and take care of the household so my mother could re-enter the paid workforce and have a career.
My mother was furious. She felt that she had a career, and an important one that needed doing, deserved respect, and to her was a step up, not down, from her previous paid work. She thought my sister was disrespecting the work she’d been doing for twenty years running the house.
I don’t, of course, know how your mother felt. Certainly many women were forced out of the workforce after WWII who didn’t want to go.
A close friend of mine’s 93 year old mother went (I can’t think of the city right now.) She got interviewed for the news but apparently they didn’t mention her age.
I agree that everyone has to judge for themselves what they’re able to do and that many people can’t manage this sort of protest.
They may be more afraid of being attacked and/or thrown in jail.
Ours was pretty much white; but so is the immediate area.
Yeah, I thought of this. 
Why are people saying Oh its meaningless, its all old white people.
Like we don’t count?
We remember the 60’s.
A sad contrast though - one of my best friends was quietly bemoaning his mother’s fall into the Fox News trap. She used to talk openly about how she attended such protests in the 60s, was willing to push for her right to do serious work (she was the senior HR rep. in a major company) and yet these days, it’s all about punishing “those lazy people” and other leeches of her social security benefits.
People of any age and color can fall into the traps of entitlement and bad information.
I think not even then. This is the President who watched the TV for hours when his bully boys were ransacking the Capitol before taking any action at all. An honest-to-god civil war will merely make him dig in like the blood-sucking tick he is.
On the plus side, the No Kings rallies of yesterday had a much larger turnout than the largest Tea Party distributed rally of April 15, 2009, which was well under a million participants across 750 locations.
But the real key is that that Tea Party movement organized itself after and outside of those protests, going so far as to have a convention less than a year later.
So what are the demands that the No More Kings movement are going to make of politicians? The Tea Party knew that answer for itself, and ended up taking over the Republican party and eventually altering the course of the nation’s politics.
I attended my local protest, and now I’m asking: what can we do to get involved and make a real change? It’s going to take a lot of hard work and some good ideas ruthlessly followed up on - we need not just to “elect Democrats” but also make sure they make the kinds of reforms that will change how politics is done.