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No Kings, the Second Time Around
Or Golfing While Rome Burns
Yes, in the ever more ominously unsettled (dis-)United States of Donald J. Trump, I recently went to the hate America rally in New York City .Or at least that's what Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson insisted it was. Who knew that so unbelievably many Americans, millions of us across the United States, would hate this country enough to go out and march in the recent No Kings demonstrations, even in places where we might have feared being in distinct danger from the troops of our president?
In the days before the latest No Kings demonstrations, no matter whom I talked to or where they lived, they seemed to be planning to go to their local version of that march/rally.My neighbors, other city people, suburbanites, even friends living in the countryside.And despite the people I knew who had marched in the first round of No Kings rallies, as I did, that wasn't true then.This time, just about everybody turned out, or so it seemed!
Oh, wait!I suddenly thought of someone who wasn't there.Oops, let me take that back. He was there, he just didn't know it.He was on sign after sign after sign, doing this, doing that, doing the inconceivable or do I mean, sadly enough, the all-too-conceivable?
Take this one that I copied down, for example:
Tyrant
Rapist
Usurper
Madman
Pedophile
And Im sure you know just what the first letters of those five words spell out!
Only Butterflies Should Become Monarchs
For me, that march began not at 50th Street and Seventh Avenue where I came out of the subway, but at the subway platform uptown where I was waiting to get on a train to the march. I suddenly noticed that the elderly woman (and I say that advisedly as an elderly man) standing next to me was carrying a handmade sign the first of literally thousands I would see that day that said, No dictators/no kings and, when I asked her about it, she promptly replied, I would have called Trump a c-word, but he lacks the depth and warmth.
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