Shouts and cheers, honking horns, people banging on drums. Oshkosh. No kings—at least not today. I’m with my sister and great nephew, attending the nearest national rally, about 20 miles south of their home in Appleton, Wisconsin. I’m up here with them because I’m getting cataract surgery (left eye, tomorrow). But what the heck, Saturday is open. Let’s go to the No Kings rally. One of multi-thousands of rallies across the country.
The collective vibration is enormous. Honk. Honk. Save the country. But as we walk among them, as the cheers and claps reverberate, I can’t stop feeling small and cynical—by myself, a spectator among the participants. Does creating change amount to nothing more than joining the cheers?
We can’t shrug and surrender the country to the idiots and racists, the billionaire warmongers. I want to feel myself expand spiritually, become part of … what? The anti-Trump, we’re-better-than-you-guys movement?
The drums beat. We keep wandering through the park, looking at the signs. Lots of them are basically middle fingers to the president: “No crown for the clown.” “Elect a rapist. Expect to get f**ked.”
And then I see this one: “Power to the people. No one is illegal.”
And suddenly everything changes. I’m no longer a spectator. The words are simple—they’re cliches, right? In this context, amidst the cries and cheers, the honks and drumbeats of endless enthusiasm, the words come to life. And I start to cry.
On that day, I found myself envisioning a future in which they were true. I wasn’t angry and alone with them but part of a wave of awareness. The honking car horns, the beating drums, the shouts and cries were a thousand-plus people—nationwide, worldwide, multi-millions of people—embracing the dispossessed and rejected among us and creating a world, this very moment, in which no one is illegal. No one is collateral damage. No one is less than human.
This is one planet. We’re still learning to live with each other on it.
Robert Koehler is the author of ‘Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.’
