While Trump presided over a noxious display of military might at his Soviet-style parade in Washington yesterday, we participated in the No Kings protest against dictatorship and for democracy.
Thousands of people in Albany came out to peacefully protest the accumulation of unconstitutional power by the current administration, to denounce its cruelty, to speak out against its policies that favor the rich and hurt the poor and middle class, to condemn the use of our own military on protestors in Los Angeles, and mostly to rally against the lying, corrupt, despicable, morally squalid man currently serving as president.
Contrasted with peaceful protests attended by millions of people in thousands of locations around the country was an act of extreme political violence—the assassination of a democratic state senator and her husband and the shooting of another senator and his wife.
We the people, we must resist.
Harriet carried her sign that said “Save Democracy” while I waved the United States flag. I was conflicted about carrying the flag, and considered displaying it upside down as a sign of distress. But the flag belongs to me as much as it does to the right wing that has co-opted our national symbol to represent only their form of patriotism. The flag belongs to all of us, and everyone who protested yesterday is an American patriot. There were many U.S. flags to be seen.
Dissent is democracy. But will our protests lead to any change for the better? I don’t know. I do know that for the first time in a while I felt connected to many others who believe a better future is possible for our country and our people.
And as Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
We the people, we must dissent.
I believe the left and the right have more in common than most of us realize, but we are being deliberately and methodically pitted against each other by corrupt leaders and a complicit corporate media.
We must wake up and find common ground for the common good.
We must resist the move toward authoritarianism. We must weaken Trump and elect better leaders. Dissent, resist, demand.
