A small protest on a sunny day in a small town
Where to begin. What to say. Quick – grab their attention. Hi! Over here!
The small, or not so small suburban town I live in provides a neat microcosm of the country, in the same way that the job I currently have is an example of what happens when compliance in advance is the rule and backstabbing is the norm. I’ve never worked at a school where the head hates the students and faculty almost equally. I’ve never lived in a town where the political divides were on houses with flags, and January 6th stickers, and Trump decals.
The Democratic Committee in the town has started having a weekly protest. Last week was the first, kicking off with International Women’s Day. Over 250 people showed up, and there was a nice mix of ages. People seemed genuinely happy that something was going on, and while many cars were silent, a satisfying number honked and waved approval.
This week’s protest started off small, but grew. People talked to each other – in a town like this, many people know each other. Last week, a woman who must have been in her 90s, in a neat coat and warm hat, handed me back a sign as she left, and smiled an achingly beautiful smile, blue eyes bright, a strength quietened, but still very evident. “Thank you,” she said politely. “Thank you!” I told her. I wanted to hug her.
This week, the mood was somewhat different. The woman next to me started talking when a truck drove by and yelled a gay slur. She turned to me and said “That’s all they know how to say. I’m an 80 year old woman – I’m certainly not that.”
She continued. “Where are the young people? We do this because it reminds me of the 1960s, when we protested.” I heard her later saying to someone, “maybe we protested because of the draft. I don’t want them to bring that back.” “It wasn’t just that,” the person responded. “There were lots of reasons to protest then.”
Two white men in a tiny white truck drove by three times, yelling “Trump!” at us. One truck slowed down to take pictures of us, Trump sticker on the back of his truck cab window. A man and his wife walked past and said, “We just ate lunch at that restaurant over there. You’re blocking the crosswalk. You’re disturbing business.” Some people remonstrated with him. He acted as though he was teaching us a lesson.
“How American,” I said to the woman. “Don’t protest, it’s bad for business.” She looked slightly concerned, but why I wasn’t sure.
Someone had brought a banjo and they were singing “This Land is Your Land.” “How 60s,” someone said.
Another person said to me that they didn’t know what to think about the Democrats voting to avoid the shutdown. She thought that Schumer had been right, though. “I read two articles, and it seems to me it’s about 50-50.” I disagreed, and told her that I thought they would blame the Democrats no matter what. “That’s true,” she said. “They keep blaming Biden. They’ll probably keep blaming him if he were dead.”
I stood by the corner of the road, but the people next to me kept changing. “I don’t want to be right up front there,” said one woman, shortly after the truck taking our pictures went by. Another woman said, “they all seem to think he’s a tough man. They like that. But he’s not.”
A car drove by, honking, and the man driving waved a large rainbow fan out the window. The person with the cowbell rang it enthusiastically, as they did for all the honking cars. How good, I thought, to be prepared with a rainbow fan to wave at people. I heard the man with the cowbell say he had brought the bigger one this week.
Some people drove by with their windows open, and yelled out things like, “thank you!”, “good for you for doing this”, “well done.” A family drove by and honked. I remembered them from the previous week. I see the kids waiting for the school bus when I am on my way to work.
Then a big man in a large black pickup truck went by slowly down the side street, only a few feet away. He kept waving his free arm at us and shouting angrily, “World War 3! World War 3!” He kept repeating the phrase. I finally turned to him and every time he said, “World War 3”, I shouted back “Read a Book! Read a Book!”
It was all I could think of. He was practically frothing at the mouth, staring viciously at a group of mostly retirees holding signs. He finally had to move on, he was blocking the intersection. I don’t think he thought that someone – me – would face him and yell back.
“What does he mean?” asked the new woman next to me, with an older man by her side. I explained that I thought he was implying that helping Ukraine was going to mean it was our fault if there was a war. “Oh,” she said. “It didn’t seem to make any sense.”
Near the end of the hour – only an hour! – a counter protester turned up and went to the other side of the small garden area which intersected the main street, and held up his electioneering signs for Trump, waving them at each car that went past him.
More cars went by. Clearly the Trump group had told their friends. A white truck waited at the intersection, huge steel radiator grill pointing directly at us, a MAGA hat on the dashboard. “There’s a Trumper,” said the person next to me. He drove towards us then turned away into the main road.
But more people waved support, and when a small tractor-trailer went by and honked with the big truck horn, the sound felt reassuring. A few lobstering trucks went by – they did not wave. The Post Office mini truck went past, but carried on without any gestures. “They should support this. They could all lose their jobs,” said another person.
A man in a big pickup went by, thumb down, while his strangely pale son looked at us as though we were aliens or if he had just left the house for the first time in days.
Finally, the hour was up. We could stay, or not. There would be another protest next week. And the small crowd drifted off, evaporating into the streets. One man with a Tibetan embroidered vest walked quickly away. I’d never seen him before.
For the rest of the day, I felt anxious when I saw a black truck like the one with the shouting man that I’d faced up to. There suddenly seemed to be so many trucks like that one, all driven by angry looking men. I tried to go for a walk down some trails, but I was alone. My car took the parking space vacated by a black truck. I turned back, and opted for a walk on the beach. I didn’t want to be alone in the woods.
People threatening a group of older people over 60, holding handmade signs, aren’t bothered if people lose their Medicare, or if they have to sacrifice a country so they can ride around in their trucks, yelling at people they disagree with. They don’t care about their fellow citizens – they don’t seem to see them as citizens. The men who had driven by three times in their small truck actually had walked through the group, angrily. I wondered why so many of these people were largish men, lumpy, misshapen, liable to hurt you just by brushing past you. When had all these people been formed? Education surely had missed them. Brutality was clearly preferable to discussion. The “Greed is Good” movement of the 1980s in American life had clearly missed them. Now these people believed that a group of narcissist billionaires would suddenly care about them. But they do have things in common. Racism. A taste for revenge. An endless resentment. A desire to be seen as big and tough, and a hatred of anyone who threatens that. Women. Educated people. Difference. The unknown, anything outside of a small town, in a land of small towns, adds up to a lot of fear.
I thought of the woman standing next to me, who said she was in her 80s, and asked where the young people were. I thought of the young people who had said to me, not worried that I was quickly approaching membership of that group, that they wished all the old people would die because they were the problem.
The men who threatened us were not old. The protesters were old.
Maybe, like that strangely pale kid in the passenger seat of his dad’s pickup, staring at us as his father used the emperor’s thumbs down to express his displeasure, we all need to get out more. The man who said we were hurting business with our protesting provided, unwittingly, the most succinct explanation of why Americans are beginning to lose their humanity. All that matters, is the money.
It was a beautiful day today, the first when spring seemed to be possible. People raking lawns, cleaning out cars. The sunset is rose and deep blue, and my skin is slightly sunburnt. There are so many beautiful things to appreciate and see. But everywhere today, there was a lingering darkness, like a shade, or the smoke from an acrid fire.
Even spring won’t take this dark ice in some hearts away.
