no kings

How strange. I’ve been going to demonstrations for a long, long while now. I began once upon a distant time in opposition to the nightmarish all-American war in Vietnam. And almost 60 years later, that war, in some sense, has come home. Hence, the other day, I found myself at the “No Kings” demonstration in New York City, one of more than 2,000 (yes, 2,000!) across this country of ours at which millions—yes, again, literally millions!—of Americans reportedly turned out. These days, in New York where I live, such demonstrations are often launched from Bryant Park, right behind the classic 42nd Street library on Fifth Avenue, and the marchers normally walk down Fifth for perhaps 20 blocks. The last time I went to a demonstration there, I didn’t walk myself but stood and watched all the marchers with their signs go past me, and it took perhaps 35 minutes or so for them to slowly, slowly do so. That time, which was then typical of such demonstrations, most of the protesters were, like me, also old and white.

No more. The other day at that No Kings march in New York, I wove my way ever so slowly through the crowd to Fifth Avenue and 40th Street just after the march had begun and started watching the demonstrators, packed into literally every square inch of that wide avenue, ever so slowly crawl by me. That crowd ranged from babies in strollers to old people like me, and looked like it represented a distinct cross section of everybody in America, whether by race or age. How many of us were there? Who knows? CBS News simply and vaguely said “tens of thousands,” while the local Fox News station, which obviously had no interest in playing up such demonstrations, still claimed that “tens of thousands of people marched in New York City and the Tri-State area.” If I had to guess, I would say that at least a couple of hundred thousand people crept down Fifth Avenue that day (and on that figure the British Guardian agrees, suggesting “over 200,000” in New York and “millions” nationally).