I must protest and so must you.
Resist. Fascism. Fight. For. Humanity.
Pretty in Pink at the Women’s March / Rally in downtown St. Petersburg, FL on March 8th, 2025
I believe, if I had been alive in the 60s, I would have burned my bras.
I would have protested the war in Vietnam, and inequity, and fascism wherever it rears its ugliest of heads.
I would like to believe that if I had lived in Nazi Germany, I would’ve been a Jew who helped Jews escape, but… it is far more likely that I would have been a coward.
I am a coward, but I hope I would have been called to courage by the moment, and by my conscience. I hope I would have found the gumption to stand up for us, to stand up for myself.
I am a coward, and Jewish enough for Hitler, and I will protest the unlawful persecution of trans people through litigation and passport bullshit and voting shenanigans and ERASURE.
I will protest President Trump’s attempts to groom us for dictatorship.
I will protest the new waves of fascism.
I will protest the disappearing of people by my government, regardless of the documents they possess. (“Papers.” “Papers,” I hear the Nazis demand in the movie theatre of my mind.)
I will protest the unconscionable genocide of the Palestinian people, by a group of people WHO SHOULD ABSOLUTELY FUCKING KNOW BETTER.
I will PROTEST because what good is this privilege if I do not.
I will protest because I have a working conscience and empathy and I know what is like to not be protected by laws that were made only for people who look like me.
A woman in this country of mine, the divided states of America, was arrested for having a miscarriage.
This is a real thing that really happened, really recently.
That is some Handmaid’s Tale shit right there.
As one of my favorite memes goes, “The Handmaid’s tale was supposed to be fiction, not a fucking manual.”
Yes, I am a coward. When it comes down to it, when it comes down to being injured or brutalized or jailed, when it comes down to protecting my body if my physical safety is threatened, I would probably run.
I would prefer to do better. I would like to be braver.
As Jane Fonda so perfectly put it, “This is our documentary moment.”
If I want to be better than I think I am, braver than I have ever known myself to be, then I must begin by protesting now. I GET TO protest now.
And if you have a conscience. If you care about the sacredness of human lives, regardless of dogma or sex or gender or skin color or marriage or immigration status, then YOU TOO MUST PR0TEST.
It is your sacred covenant with this American life — if you are safe enough to do so, you must protest.
You don’t have to do so with signs in the streets. I will, but you don’t have to.
“We like other colors but FREEDOM looks so good on us” / The front of my sign at the Women’s March / Rally in downtown St. Petersburg, FL on March 8th, 2025
The Resistance needs all of us.
All of us participating in ways that are best suited to our talents, passions, communities, and risk tolerance levels.
I have a confession to make: I have not been able to bring myself to call my representatives. For whatever reason, I don’t don’t don’t don’t want to. (Yes, I am embarrassed. It’s so simple! So easy! I even have the gift of gab! And yet I don’t do this thing.) But here is what I have and will do: I will make signs and I will march. I will donate and I will disseminate. I will amplify the Bat Signals.
Somewhere there is someone who cannot leave their home to be in the streets, isn’t social media literate, cannot donate, but has no problem ringing the offices of their Senators on the daily. My hope-bordering-on-belief is that this evens out. Balance. Each according to their calling. Each according to their resources. Each according to their willingnesses.
No one of us can do all the things.
“First they came for trans folks and I spoke up right away because I know the rest of the fucking poem” / The back of my sign at the Women’s March / Rally in downtown St. Petersburg, FL on March 8th, 2025 (I cannot take the credit because I did not compose this, but thank you, human of the internet who made this up!)
When I lived in an intentional community, I noticed that my housemate Deniz didn’t really mind the task I hated the most (taking out the garbage). I, however, had no problem emptying the dishwasher (and with 6 housemates on the floor, a lot of emptying the dishwasher was needed). So I did that extra.
At Toastmasters, I almost always take the role of Grammarian, because I love to capture the marvelous and funny and poignant turns of phrases people say, and I am meticulous about words and don’t mind calling their attention to improper uses of grammar. Most of the other folks don’t want this job. Works out great!
This is the quiet glory of community.
You take out the garbage, I’ll empty the dishwasher, okay?
We protect all of us by waging Resistance on every front:
by calling those senators and reps,
by voting in elections all the way down to the towns,
by flooding stupid government inboxes with memes,
by canvassing,
by teaching our children about the evils of imperialism, the history of dictatorships, & how to combat groupthink.
plutocracy / RESIST FASCISM / Free Mahmoud / protesting with fellow Unitarian Universalists and other people of conscience at a busy intersection in my strange red state // St. Petersburg, FL /// March 10th, 2025
You can even make a difference through small acts of resistance, ones that annoy or befuddle the evildoers, like witty and nonsensical emails to awful government agencies, clowns showing up outside immigration hearings, giant group dances in front of vile businesses. We can find a thousand little ways to gum up the works. Bonus to you if it makes you laugh. Bonus to everyone if it makes others laugh. The Resistance doesn’t have to be stodgy.
We, like the Dark Side, can have cookies.
We, unlike the Dark Side, can have joy.
But we MUST PROTEST in some fashion.
When I protest, I don’t want to do so by:
Shaming the physical appearance of the evildoer
Slut-shaming the evildoer
Shaming their nationality, sexuality, identity, profession
Talking about what they smell like
Threatening murder or castration or people’s families
I completely understand why we do this, or at least, I think I understand why we are tempted to do this. We want to bully the bully, thinking that’s the only way he’ll understand. But the truth is that he’s probably not going to understand, whether or not we stoop to the low ground. He’s not going to understand because he is likely a sociopath.
But we’re not doing it for him. We’re not protesting for him.
We are protesting for Ian in Iowa who is a bit messed up and kind of confused and doesn’t really get the impact that this is having on, say, WOMEN, who opens up his news app and sees thousands upon thousands of, let’s just say women, protesting with signs, and maybe he goes, hm, why might they be protesting when they could be home having pancakes? Why might that be? And maybe Ian gets a little more informed that day about the plight of, hell, let’s say, women, and maybe just maybe he starts to act a wee bit differently, and then the whole butterfly effect thing is possible.
When protesting evildoing in its many many oppressive forms, I want to focus on their harmful ACTIONS, and CHOICES.
I want them to rot for being rotten.
I’m interested in dismantling their ARGUMENTS
Proving false their IDEOLOGIES
Laying bare their HYPOCRISIES
Exploiting their INCONSISTENCIES
Disproving their FALSEHOODS
I do not care if they’ve paid for sex or had a boyfriend on the side.
I will not make fun of their hands or their ears or their marriages. Or their spray tans. Or their supposed genitalia.
At the same time, when we’ve tried every other tool in the shed, public shaming starts to look quite handy. Just as I think anything that heals can be medicine, so too I think most anything that works against tyrants comes out on the right side of history.
So often lately, I think of Viktor Frankl’s sentiment “the best of us did not survive.”
We have already lost some of the best of us.
What would you have done during the Holocaust, dear?
Here is your chance to find out.
Big Love,
Lila
P.S. See you at a No Kings protest tomorrow. 5 0 5 0 1: 50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement.
P.P.S. I love you.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
- commonly (mis?)attributed to Edmund Burke, possibly a paraphrase of a concept found in John Stuart Mill’s 1867 inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews
I'll be out there today. Thank-you for the dose of courage. I'm a coward too and don't like any of this, but it MUST be done.