Peaceful Protest

This coming Saturday, I shall be exercising my right to peaceful protest.

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

I have been demonstrating in public in one way or another ever since I was a teenager. My first such outing was when my school friend Lucy persuaded me to join her in a day-long sponsored fast on Trafalgar Square to raise awareness and money to help fight the famine in Africa. My parents, an exceptionally witty couple, gave themselves some considerable entertainment at the notion of their daughter’s forgoing food for more than two hours at a stretch; and I now wonder myself just what the fine people of London made of my rotund and ruddy-cheeked self’s thrusting a collection tin into their faces with the smug declaration that “I’m fasting” – as one man gallantly observed, “it might do you some good” – but I did it, and, while hardly claiming to have since braved rack and rope with the valor of the martyrs of old, have continued, when possible, to raise my voice wherever I have seen the need.

When I was at college, marching was woven into student life. We marched to protest injustice. We marched to protest hunger. We marched, it seemed almost weekly, to protest Margaret Thatcher, then Education Secretary, whom we called Thatcher the Milk-Snatcher since she had abolished the program providing free milk for children in state-funded primary schools, and who now, having herself benefited materially from state-aided further education and seeing no compelling reason to pay the favor forward to the next generation, was forever trying to slash our grants. At least once we protested the Vietnam War by marching around the Royal Holloway College campus – 135 acres of wooded parkland set just outside the bucolic village of Englefield Green in deepest verdant Surrey, a statement which must have struck terror to the heart of the American government. But the war did end, however, so who knows but that they were paying attention after all?

In my busy early adulthood, my time – and, seen now through the possibly rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia, any urgent necessity – for protests had shrunk, but I did turn out when I saw fit. I marched for women’s rights. I marched for gay rights. I marched with friends. I marched with friends I hoped would become more than friends. I declined to march with my father to protest the release of The Life of Brian, on the grounds that I had seen the film and found it not offensive at all, but very funny: a refusal which, in my particular family, was itself roughly the protest equivalent of setting myself on fire while throwing myself in front of a horse while chained to the government’s railings.

In America, I did not protest for many years. I was there on a foreign journalist’s visa, which allowed me to live and pursue my career there on the very reasonable proviso that by confining myself to foreign outlets I not take work from an American journalist while I was doing so. It did not, however, allow me to vote; and the idea of protesting a government I had not helped to choose seemed somewhat like walking into another person’s house and criticizing their furniture. So I stayed quiet.

Then I met and married Mr. Los Angeles, and became, first a green card holder, and then a citizen. After so many years as a guest – albeit a most warmly welcomed and hospitably entertained one – in the home of other people, I now had a home of my own. And it was a home, I discovered, that I cared desperately to protect.

This coming Saturday, people across the nation will be taking part in the No Kings protest. The mandate, on this protest as it was on the last, is to protest peacefully and with good humor. We are also encouraged – partly as a protective device, and partly as a comment on the ridiculousness of those against whom we are protesting – to dress for the event in inflatable animal costumes. For much of the country, this is merely a suggestion; for a city of hams such as Los Angeles, it is a clarion call to extravaganza.

The last No King’s Day saw Santa Monica’s Palisades Park transformed into Alice in Wonderland after the Cheshire Cat had handed her some pretty darned good mushrooms. We had people dressed as frogs, as unicorns, as pandas, as zebras, as Darth Vader, as Dorothy from Kansas, as Smokey the Bear, as Bozo the Clown. We had people dressed as butterflies with signs that read, “This is the only Orange Monarch we want.” We had small children with signs that read “Stamp Out Ice.” We had battle-scarred older women with signs that read, “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this (fill in your obscenity of choice).” We had flamboyant gay couples with signs that read, “A Pair of Queens beats a King.” We had a sober-looking thirty-something man with a sign that read, “You know it’s BAD when a straight white guy makes a sign.”

At one point, one of our local Westside heroes, the late and sorely lamented film director Rob Reiner, unofficially known as the Mayor of Hollywood, stood up to make a calm and dignified speech about the need to fight for our continued democracy. When he was halfway through it, a heckler interrupted him. The crowd tensed, and the police in the area, until then laid back and smiling along with the protesters, began to sit up and take notice. “Let him speak,” said Rob, then. “He has the right to his opinion, too.” We all relaxed, knowing that with the Mayor in charge, everything would all be all right – as indeed it was. We had no idea then that two months later, both the Mayor and his wife would be dead.

The horror of Rob and Michele Reiner’s death was buried in the future that day. There was only laughter and dancing and friends greeting old buddies and strangers making new friends while the sun shone and music filled the air and below us, the Pacific Ocean glittered like a jewel beside Pacific Coast Highway, as, together, we pledged to fight with all our might to maintain the America we know and still love.

There will be the same spirit abroad this Saturday; we will make sure there will. We none of us want to be protesting; we wish with all our hearts that we didn’t feel the need to do so. But since we apparently do, we’re making damn sure that we will exercise our right to do it wearing frog costumes.