Talking to Strangers

can be like touching grass

We spent the week in Montreal, enjoying the sights, the shops, the food, and the people. I managed to spend one morning at the Lachine Rapids park photographing Black Crowned Night Herons, Great Blue Herons, and Double-Crested Cormorants, and we saw some Wood Ducks and a black Gray Squirrel at the Botanical Garden; I’ll share those next week.

We drove home Friday because I was aware of the protests planned for yesterday, and was unsure of how the administration would react. How I miss having a boring President!

And because I was home, I was one of the many millions of people who attended one of the hundreds of No Kings protests. This was the social equivalent of going outside and touching grass; it was a much-needed reality check. My state of New Jersey nearly elected a Republican governor during the Covid pandemic, and there is an attempt to flip the state now that the Democratic candidate is not an incumbent. Due to the current state of events with the ruling party in power of all three branches of the federal government, many of us are concerned about their chances on the state level.

The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, October 30th 2010. This is what phone photos looked like back then.

The only political event I have ever attended was Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, in 2010. This was less a political event than a comedy show, and sadly did not restore sanity. I thought about the first No Kings protest in June, but it was rainy. Today was a beautiful day, and I had no excuse.

Except that Reddit said that “200 Proud Boys have gathered in a campground in the Pine Barrens.” No photos or proof, no evidence of what identifies them as such; I mean, I highly doubt this person walked up and asked, or got close enough to see if they had patches or regalia. I’m guessing it was reposted from Facebook, that bastion of truth and sanity. I left Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram a few years ago, but I remain on Reddit. Because New Jersey’s newspaper was bought by a tech bro and dismantled, then turned into a clickbait website, I rely on the Philly Inquirer and the local reddit subs for news. They are well moderated, but sometimes the NextDoor and Facebook group garbage gets in. This was one of those times.

The “Proud Boys” crap was posted elsewhere as well, likely an attempt to reduce attendance at these protests. I’m glad I went, because these attempts failed spectacularly. There were thousands of us, from young people in inflatable costumes to retirees and veterans, some with canes, who felt it was important to march a mile and a half down the main thoroughfare of the area. It was good to see just how many of my neighbors of all ages wanted to voice their displeasure with the current administration. It was also heartening to count how few hecklers showed up to counter-protest (two guys in white pickup trucks; one woman jogging past. I’m told about five more people were on a corner with signs, but they weren’t on the route and I didn’t see them.)

I am not a fan of crowds. People can be self-absorbed and entitled, even in Montreal, where the locals were friendly, and most of the tourists well-behaved. I was expected people to be worked up, but everyone was ebullient. Being surrounded by fellow citizens who are as fed up as you are seems to cause a sense of relief, perhaps as you realize that you are not unhinged: things are not normal.

The firehose of effluvium by the administration is a tactic meant to overwhelm and exhaust us, and I certainly let it exhaust me. But I mustered the energy for this, because it is the least I can do. They want us to stay home and be afraid of criticizing their illegal actions.

I don’t have any photos to share, as I had my phone turned off as a precaution. I took photos with a few people who liked my “Terminate Hate” shirt. I didn’t stay for the rally afterward, because I don’t need to be rallied any further.

A reminder that on any social site, you are the product. As with television before it, this medium benefits when we are afraid, divided, and angry, and stay home watching or scrolling. To keep you from looking at one of those sites, I will share this photo of a squirrel using his tail to give himself a mohawk:

Kent Peterson wrote about Thomas Pynchon recently; I’ve only read The Crying of Lot 49, which I liked very much. I’ve got an unread copy of Gravity’s Rainbow staring at me from my shelf, which it has done for at least twenty years. I’m reading William Gibson’s Spook Country at the moment; The New York Times quoted him, and many others, about their favorite scene from a Pynchon novel. This was Gibson’s:

A moment in Pynchon’s work I’ve found more urgently haunting, over the past decade or so, is the sermon given by Father Rapier in “Gravity’s Rainbow,” distinguishing between They, humans aligned with extreme wealth and technology, and lowercase we, the rest of us. As long as we clearly recognize that They can and will kill us, all’s going well for Them. But should we resist, and continue to, They begin to lose power, and as the number of resisters rises, to lose it exponentially — potentially leading, as Rapier suggests, to humanity’s salvation.

Together we are stronger.