8/4/25

Guest Essay
TAKING TO THE STREETS
HOW EFFECTIVE ARE  REGULAR PROTESTS
AT COUNTERING TRUMP'S WAR ON AMERICA?

ONE OF THE COMPLAINTS I hear most often is that Americans aren’t standing up to the cruel and destructive policies cascading from Donald Trump’s second administration.
     “Why are people ignoring the fill-in-the-blank outrage of the moment: Medicare cuts, food stamp curbs, immigrant kidnappings and deportations, extortion of colleges, law firms and other institutions?”
      Of course, millions of people are turning to the streets.
     In my hometown, Newport, R.I., a “Bridge Brigade” is sponsored by the Newport Democratic City Committee and allies at the big Newport Bridge interchange every other week. There was a big turnout on “No Kings Day” back in June. There are, in fact,  lots of demonstrations.
      But do they have an impact? Have they become so common that they are little more than barely noticed wall paper? Do they feature the same folks, mostly elderly? In short, what's the point?
     A friend, Maria Johnson, of Middletown, Conn., examines the plusses and minuses of regular protests in an essay published recently in the Hartford Courant. She’s given me permission to reprint it here.

Why We March
 By Maria Johnson
     
I AM WRITING THIS exactly six months into Donald J. Trump’s presidency. That means – I did the math – there are still three and a half years left to go. Sigh. How are we gonna make it?
     My unscientific survey – basically, of my friends and myself – reveals that four out of four people have had it, man. We’re tired, cranky, restless. Fed up.
We avoid the news, gripe to each other about whatever news seeps out, and share snarky posts. 
     And still, we suffer.
     Nothing left to do but take to the streets. Put our bodies on the line. We make protest signs, some of them serious, referencing Germany in the ’30s; some of them funny (“Only Elvis is King”), and we stand at busy intersections, where passing cars mostly honk their support.
     Are we saving democracy? That’s doubtful. Are we saving ourselves? More likely.
     “I do it for myself,” said my art teacher friend Mary who protests weekly in Burlington, VT. “I cannot do nothing.”
     Ed McKuen, one of the organizers of the weekly protests here in Middletown, said the aim is “to make people think. When they see their neighbors standing on the corner to protest what’s going on in Washington and when they see the messages people are holding up, we hope that they will think about it, maybe join us or get involved.”
     Another fellow protester said she’s out there “because otherwise I fall into despair. It’s good to be around people who think and act the way I do. It kind of keeps you going.”
     I get it. I protest to feel better, too, but I fear the serotonin may be wearing off. At yesterday’s protest, for example, I got into a dustup with a regular pedestrian at the crosswalk. Our exchange began benignly enough when he observed how consistently our group shows up. How long have we been doing this? he asked.
     I’d joined the movement when it was already months in progress, so I wasn’t sure, but I pointed out Ed McKuen – “He would know.” 
     “Oh, the communist?” said the guy, and I, so brimming with the Kumbaya spirit of the sunny morning, mistakenly believed he was making a joke about what the other team thinks of us.
     “Yep, we’re all communists,” I said.
     Then the man made himself better understood. He said that, admittedly, Trump can be hard to take, but “at least he’s getting things done.”
     Uh-oh. Getting things done?! That’s it, I told him, we’re done talking.
     “Oh, because we disagree?”
     Well, since he put it that way, yes. 
     What I couldn’t think to say in the moment is that what Trump’s “getting done” is dismantling democracy, cruelly depriving people of health care and a secure retirement, enlisting masked goons to pull innocent people off the street and deporting them to foreign jails, gutting or eliminating the government agencies that keep us safe and our children well-educated, turning on our allies, including Canada – Canada! – and generally making America a laughingstock around the world.
     Disgusted, I said, “Why don’t you talk to my friend over here who has patience with people like you?” I pointed to my optimistic pal, Phoebe, who, unlike myself, actually believes she can change MAGA minds through the power of a civil conversation. 
     “Or else,” I said, changing the subject, “we can admire these lovely flowers here,” and I took a step toward a concrete planter abounding with pink and yellow petunias.
     “Don’t come at me!” the guy said, as if I wielded a knife.
     Come at him? And they call us libs snowflakes. I was seething with anger as he finally walked away down the sidewalk.
     There was yet more drama to come – and from someone on our side!
     I had approached a woman standing alone apart from the group. I told her I was going to write an essay about our protests and asked why she was out here today.
     “It’s an opportunity to get …” she began, then stopped. “Are you recording me?”
     It seemed an odd question considering I was holding my cellphone an inch from her mouth and had no notebook in which to record her response. I said yes, I was, and she gave me a good scolding for not saying so ahead of time. 
     What the …? O-kay, I said, backing away. Fine. I won’t use you. And I headed across the street, inwardly repeating my new mantra: “Fewer people, more painting.”      

"NO KINGS DAY," June 14, Middletown, Conn.

"NO KINGS DAY," June 14, Middletown, R.I.

BECAUSE WHAT WAS I EVEN DOING HERE? I thought of Colin McEnroe, the Connecticut Public Radio host who on his Monday call-in show said he thinks there are “too many protests, frankly.” Asked by a caller to expand, he said he fears they’re becoming “background noise.” 
     “In West Hartford,” he noted, “there’s a bunch of people who protest every Saturday morning, every single Saturday morning. That’s fine, and good on them, and God bless all those guys in their gray ponytails. I think at a certain level that’s good.”
      (The “gray ponytails” crack struck me as a little mean, but there’s no denying that our Resistance movement does trend older. “I never thought at my age I’d be protesting again,” said a 74-year-old woman on the corner with me. But that’s an essay for another day.)
     McEnroe praised, by contrast, the “really effective” No Kings protest of a few weeks earlier, the wildly popular nationwide one that coincided with Trump’s bust of a birthday military parade.
     He shared an anecdote about a particularly heartbreaking situation, in which a woman declined to seek medical treatment for fear of bankrupting her family, and he mused that maybe protests can somehow be joined to educating the public -- “and then maybe when you’ve learned a few new things, you can think more about what your next protest would be…so it’ll be a sonic boom instead of a pop gun.”
     Like myself, and unlike my optimistic friend Phoebe, McEnroe despairs of MAGA types ever changing their minds, because “people’s existential identity is wrapped up in their hatred of the other side.” 
     That’s true. I barely recognize myself wearing this new existential identity.
And as with the most primitive forms of reptilian consciousness, McEnroe went on, it would “go against survival” to concede the merest point to the enemy.
     That’s true, too. And it is about survival.
     Survival of the country, survival of our personal happiness, our peace of mind, our ability, even willingness, to get along with one another, our hope in the future. That’s what’s so at risk.
     So. Will I drag my sorry-ass self and my sign back onto the sidewalk, where people will very likely annoy me, next week and the week after that for the next three and a half years? I guess I will. Because short of voting the bums out in the midterms, what else can I do?
     My friend Patty thinks I’m playing into MAGA’s hands by being ready to give up because of the unrelenting bad news out of Washington and two unpleasant encounters. My crankiness, she said, is blinding me to the loveliness of the protests, the new friends made, and the sense of solidarity, all of which does us good.
     Plus, “it’s exposure,” said another fellow protester over the encouraging honking of horns, “and any exposure we can provide – everything’s needed now.”

* * *
Maria Johnson lives with her husband in Middletown, Conn., where she paints, writes, and, okay, protests.