NO KINGS in my country

“More than 3,200 events took place across the country on Saturday [March 28, 2026], from New York City to Driggs, Idaho, a town of fewer than 2,000 people in a state Trump carried with 66 percent of the vote. Nearly half of the protests took place in Republican strongholds. Texas, Florida, and Ohio each had more than 100 events. Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah had events in the double digits. Rural communities that have never hosted a political protest before, from Seward, Alaska, to East Glacier Park, Montana, showed up for the first time. The protests went international, with tens of thousands marching in Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, and London, and in countries with constitutional monarchies, they called the protests ‘No Tyrants’.”

These allegorical figures hold dead babies. War always makes dead babies. I used to teach Mark Twain’s antiwar story, “The War Prayer” and ask my students to guess which war Twain was responding to. [The best answer: all of them.] The satire was tough for the high school juniors I was teaching; they almost never understood the story without help and maybe rarely guessed which war. (As a junior in high school, I would have got the satire—it was different war and I read newspapers, plus I’d been a solid fan of Twain since I was eight.) It was lies that took us to war in Twain’s time. It was lies that took us to war in my grandfather’s time, and in my time too. Over and over again… it is always lies that take us to war. Even the “righteous” wars begin with deceit.

We went to the No Kings march in Portland this past weekend. We have been attending marches for a long time. I said the other day that’s it’s been since 1967, but then I realized that was wrong. Try 1969. I might have been 16 years old. The best anti-war march I ever attended was the one in Seattle after Kent State (look it up) in 1970. The way I remember it, Mayor Charles Royer gave us the express lane to walk back north, but Royer wasn’t mayor till 1978, after the war. It was Wes Uhlman who turned over the freeway and then lowered flags to half staff the next day. (I looked it up in Walt Crowley’s Rite of Passage—Gary’s had that memoir in his hands and wouldn’t give it back. He kept finding events and people we knew and things that are missing. The Id and the Bookworm are there, but not Red and Black Books or Puss and Books.) On the first Kent State protest day back in 1970, business people walked out of office buildings in downtown Seattle to join us. [Public opinion had shifted. People’s children had gone to war and come back ruined or not at all. The President lied about where he was killing, and we found out.] That evening, I walked out on my job at Taco Bell because the owner of the franchise told me the kids at Kent State deserved to die.

Over the years and speaking to many people about anti-war activism during the past 50-odd years, I have been astonished again and again by the naivete of my generation. I have talked to white men and women who were blissfully unaware of racism, war, poverty, and unions during the time I first began marching for peace, boycotting seedless grapes, and reporting racist bullying on public buses—all before I was out of my teens.

Pay attention.

On their last day of high school, when I was teaching Senior English, I would hand out a page of recommendations. Read the news, I told them. Read novels and nonfiction and op-eds and poetry. On the one side I recommended books “If you liked X, try reading Y.” and on the other I listed reliable news sources of various perspectives. For example, The Heritage Foundation on the right was balanced by The Nation on the left. Today, The Heritage Foundation would not be on my recommended list at all—it was generally truthful in those days but that’s gone. Today it represents anti-American notions of privilege, elitism, and spite.

How did we come to this? How did we, as a nation, reelect a felon, a man with a long-documented history of deceptive, greedy, racist, misogynistic and otherwise bigoted, elitist, and illegal behavior? I person who made fun of a “handicapped” person on national television? A man who bragged about sexual harassment?

People promote what benefits them, even when it hurts others, even when it’s untrue and cruel. No one reads the news, younger generations believe what they are told, and some think eight million protesters were paid? More fools they…

This past Saturday, we walked a mile downhill to the river, arrived early, watched protesters arrive from the other side and joined behind the massive Great Blue Heron banner. We joined and marched along with the drummers for half a mile or a mile or so. The drummers were wonderful. We were identifiable protesters because of the “We the People” sign Gary carried—it was too warm for my red hat. People carried all sorts of signs. I can’t remember them all now. The event was supposed to go to 4pm, but we left while people were still arriving. We stopped for a late lunch, and the manager asked us how it was going. Someone had called in sick and so he was unable to go, but he was excited about the march and talking to him was one of the more meaningful moments of the day.

The news gets worse and worse, but maybe people are finally waking up?

“MAKE LYING WRONG AGAIN” was my favorite sign. There were many, many different slogans, many directed at that person in the White House who is all about the gold. How do people miss that? All that fancy gilt—what do you suppose that signifies?

Not as many children as I’ve seen at times, more people in wheelchairs, and way too many dogs.

Here we after all these years still marching against the brutality of war—something we’ve been doing all our lives—gray-haired and still not giving up. We’d like to think it’s the last. It won’t be.