A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES BEGINS?
They came out across the US and in the ex-pat centers of Europe. High spirits. It was good to be out and among people in analog reality rather than hunched over laptops and phones communicating digitally.
In London’s Trafalgar Square, the weather was spectacular but the crowd small and showing signs of overexposure to English wit.
Erich McIlroy pictured above is a stand-up comic and he made an important point in his opening speech: Mockery is an excellent non-violent tool.
The crowd in the main was fifty shades of grey (or excellent hair colouring, London’s salons are famous for the skills of its colourists). It was also overwhelmingly female.
There are, according to the UK’s Office of National Statistics, around 71,000 Americans living in London. Overall 200k Yanks live throughout Britain. There is speculation this number will rise during Trump 2:0 .
London is a world city and while the tiny huddled mass of Americans chanted and laughed in front of the National Gallery, adjacent to them was a small group of Iranians demanding regime change in their benighted homeland. Their posters and pamphlets were not humorous. They depicted dissidents being hung and testimony of people who had been tortured. And just along the front portico plaza of the museum was a larger crowd of Turks protesting President Erdoğan’s arrest last week of Istanbul mayor İkram Imamoğlu, his likely opponent in the next presidential election scheduled for 2028.
The Turkish demo was also lacking in humor. People’s faces were for the most part grim and the participants in general much younger than the Americans twenty yards away.
But then, the Turks have had practice protesting against the high-handedness of the Erdoğan regime and his security forces.
The unfocused nature of the US protest reminded me a bit of the Occupy movement. I did some reporting on the phenomenon when an Occupy encampment was set up around St. Paul’s Cathedral in 2011, if I remember correctly.
At yesterday’s Hands Off gathering there was a pep rally, team spirit kind of vibe. At one point, the circle of demonstrators closed in tight as they chanted and it looked like just before kickoff in a big-time college football game, say at Penn State, when Coach says, “Ok, everybody bring it in”. And the whole team and assistant coaches and trainers and clipboard holders and waterboys and girls reach over one another and chant 1-2-3 Team!
To sustain this kind of movement, a movement whose goal - unstated - is to get rid of the Trump regime or at least make it change course, I’m not sure high spirits are enough. A bit more anger may be required, not so much Hands Off as Pissed Off.
As thousand mile journey’s go this was a reasonable first step, but I’m not sure you can reason with Trump and the MAGA minions. Next time everybody gets together a little less pep rally and a lot more serious organizing should be the order of the day.
And that Next Time should be soon, like Next Week.
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