protest every day
Full disclosure: I didn't go out and protest yesterday. Or today either. I went to work. But I did send some kind emails to people, which I hope counts for something!
When we were protesting on Tuesday it was strange to see folks walking around like everything was normal—lots and lots of folks, since we were in the middle of Boston! To the extent that it feels like the world is ending I'd expect everyone to be out in the streets letting everyone in earshot know that things are NOT OK. But of course we all have responsibilities—jobs and kids and friends and self-care. Important stuff.
But it would be nice if we could manage somehow to keep a protest feeling going even when we're doing all those other things. I'm thinking maybe a pin or badge or something—combined with an effort to be proactively kind to everyone I talk to while simultaneously not letting any offensive shit slip by uncommented upon. That's hard—probably even harder than making time to be out on the barricades every day. When I think about the administration, and the people supporting it, I want to start punching; and when I'm having a nice conversation with an older white woman who it turns out, oops, is kind of anti-immigrant racist, it's really hard to politely point out that maybe she should be kinder, or at least consider the demonstrable economic benefits of immigration. I'm working on it.
Real protesting is good too. I don't want to miss another big event like I did last weekend, so if you know of anything happening fill me in! I'm following the Boston Activist Calendar on facebook because it came up in a search, but with less than 3000 followers to date it can't be too important. And I overcame my strong resistance to joining anything and became a part of our local "Indivisible" group (that's how I learned about Tuesday's event, I think). But I'm still not seeing anything happening locally this weekend. Maybe people are busy planning their Super Bowl parties? Failing that, I'm looking ahead to the General Strike on February 17: if you do facebook, check it out and mark yourself as going. You can make it a thing! (For the record, right now there are 10,244 people "going" and 17,682 "interested". That's... not enough.)
You know, maybe this is all a fad and we'll soon get used to the Trump presidency. But I'm not used to it yet, so this is what I'm doing.