Photo credit: nokings.org
Several years passed before I took to the streets in protest once again. The reasons for my lack of action in the face of reactionary politics were tied to the impossibility of protest making any difference at all in the order of things. For someone who spent a life fighting awful situations, resulting from the Vietnam War and supporting women’s right to reproductive services, it has often seemed like I lived in a different world and in many ways it was a very different world. Also, my fellow protesters disappeared long ago into the fog of careerism and moving on with life. To me, moving on long meant protest, so it was like losing an old friend, which I had done in reality decades ago. I remained flawed, but that admission does not lessen my analysis and actions.
I was shocked when I arrived at a local cinema for training in rapid response to ICE raids in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. The cinema auditorium filled to its maximum occupancy with only a handful of seats remaining before the presentation began. The program was well planned and to the point, something training sessions in the past never were. I wrote an article (Substack, May 15, 2025) a few weeks before about the arrest of a local immigrant worker and that experience shook me. This, the town where the raid took place, was voted the number one town in the US nearly 15 years ago and seeing ICE police in combat gear with rifles used in combat and the person at the front of their line of march with a battering ram over his shoulders was shocking. A drone hovered high above the scene and I wondered in which country this happened.
Within an hour, I was back on the streets of the town where a protest to counter Donald Trump’s military parade was to be held. This was the “No Kings” response to Trump’s military parade in DC, and thousands rallied here with millions coming out around the country. That gun violence took place in response around the country was no surprise. While the middle fingers and peeling tires were apparent but few, this is a radically changed society. Back to the local protest, I was amazed at how many people came out to protest. I stood in front of the town office building before from causes ranging from anti-war to criticism of the Obama bailouts of big banks during the subprime mortgage crisis, but this demonstration dwarfed those efforts, however noble they were.