Walking toward downtown Northampton for “No Kings Day,” I see an older man effortfully wielding a sign that reads, “So Bad Even the Introverts are Here.” I sometimes think that the quality of cleverness, the accumulated wit of all the protest signs at an event, define the power of a movement. But the crowds in their sheer size might be just as crucial, and Main Street overflows with people. Maybe 2,000, possibly 3,000—a collection of folks somewhere between “not enough,” and “maybe there is hope.”

A marching band turns east from Gothic Street and a drum ensemble has gathered on the island separating traffic on Route Five. The drummers beat furiously with hands or sticks on snares, congas, cowbells, plastic containers and bass-drums while others clap their hands. Music soars everywhere, tunes cross one another in the air with joyous, cacophonous insistence - a man in a wheelchair strums a twelve string guitar. An acapella ensemble sings tight harmonies through bullhorns, an oddly improvised way to combine the crudest form of sound magnification—associated with police commands to pull over—with the delicacy of human voices merged in practiced counterpoint.

Nobody's Voice is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A man in a grim reaper outfit, walking on stilts bears a sign reading - “Donald Trump burned 168 Iranian girls alive.” The streets overflow with people trying to stand apart or blend in. Some signs simply say “no kings” - minimalism in a time when the point might be nothing more than numbers. The crowd, I imagine, embodies a limitless number of questions. Is it too late? Are we too few? Too old? Too disorganized? Too peaceful? Too unthreatening? Too divided?

Indeed, these people, the majority for sure, sport grey hair, wrinkles, wearied gaits and maybe the strange understanding that, in a seeming eyeblink, we all have been transformed from young, zealous radicals who once chanted “two, four, six, eight, organize and smash the state,” to becoming part of a last stand against the fascist nightmare that would have blown our minds in 1968. I see young people too, but not enough. Mostly white people make up the throngs, but Northampton is just a small piece of something vastly larger. My wife shows me a photo on her cell phone from Minneapolis where a wide angle photo cannot take in the vast crowds. No one knows just yet the scope of the rallies, the size and distress of the nation that marches in enthusiastic disunity. We are the counterpoint running concurrently with the megalomaniacal dipshit and his World War III players. Confusion and a primitive, momentary unformed passion guide people to surge, pause and move again.

I project my own darkness onto this crowd. I am frantically creating a composite out of faces, signs and movement, building a narrative out of images that refuse to be captured. Do people stare in mutual horror at the bottomless pit of banality and evil? The pain that our empire inflicts always occurs just beyond the horizon - but the agony seems palpable, intuitively closer, the Doppler effect of a high pitched whine as objects close in.

We march from Strong Avenue toward Smith College—so local, so familiar—past Bucci’s Hair Stylists, past An Oriental Taste, past Citizen’s Bank with their armaments holdings. As we pass the Bank with its unremarkable green sign, a woman holds a piece of cloth up high: “Citizens Bank Funds the War Machine.”

An elderly man seated on the curb at the corner of Main and Masonic holds a sign reading, “Shame GOP! In your guts, you know he’s nuts!” Another person dresses as Donald Trump with a huge, misshapen, paper mache face and limbs cloaked in American Flags with the words, pedophile, murderer, liar and idiot scrawled on each limb. Trump is everywhere - on signs, on flyers, on handouts, in the involuntary, almost epileptic impulses torturing our brains.

In my 78 years I’ve never seen anything comparable—we have walled off an entire universe into separate parts, the classical Freudian defense mechanism of splitting the psyche into good and evil. Trump has evicted all of the pain of human existence, and greedily taken the role of inflicting hellish agony all to himself. Some of us might believe........

© Common Dreams