Where have all the protests gone?
Trump is burning down democracy. We go to our village greens and hold signs. These two things do not match.
Hello! It’s Thursday, May 21. Yesterday was national Millionaires Day, and if you assaulted a cop with a deadly weapon on Jan. 6, or engaged in a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government, or smashed windows and doors in the Capitol to gain unlawful entry, or stole government property, or after being pardoned you sexually abused children, or murdered someone, or plotted to murder FBI agents, or engaged in home invasion, stalking, and theft, then you, too, could soon join the Millionaires Club, thanks to Trump’s new $1.8 billion slush fund intended to put lots of taxpayer money into your filthy pockets.
The sun rose in Boston at 5:17 a.m. and will set at 8:04 p.m. for 14 hours and 47 minutes of sunlight. The waxing moon is 29% full.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac says today is a good day to graft or pollinate and we know which one Trump chose.
🔥 What’s it like outside? A pretty dramatic cooldown after some nice hot weather. The holiday weekend will be fairly nice although rather cloudy, with temps in the 60s.
⚾️ Hey, sport: Nothing hot about the Red Sox, although they finished a sweep of the Royals last night in KC. Then again, the Royals (20-30) stink even more than the Sox (22-27), so not much to brag about there.
Phillies’ DH Kyle Schwarber has 20 home runs through 50 games, a pace that could result in 66 HRs for the year. Why can’t we get players like that? Oh wait …
The non-contact ACL tear that ended the season for WNBA star Rickea Jackson of the Chicago Sky this week highlights the prevalence of such injuries among female athletes, who suffer such tears as much as 8 times more often than male athletes. It has to do with anatomy, biomechanics, and even menstrual periods. More next week.
😧 We need good trouble
Someday our great-grandchildren will marvel that we were alive during the administration of the most corrupt, amoral president in US history, and they will wonder what life was like under the jackboot of a preening, vengeful half-wit.
We can tell them now: It was horrid. It is horrid.
For this is a truly unique period in American history, and thankfully there are enough written accounts and video evidence to prove to future generations that we weren’t making this stuff up. Because on so many levels, it is unbelievable.
The latest wound to democracy is this $1.8 billion slush fund that Trump can dish out to his sycophants and bootlickers and lawbreakers at will. It is stunning in its sheer audacity.
Let’s be clear: The settlement agreement under which Trump agreed to drop his bogus $10 billion civil suit contains a very reasonable provision to resolve the claims between the parties. An IRS contractor leaked Trump’s tax returns during his first administration (as well as those of other wealthy people like Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg). Joe Biden’s Justice Department prosecuted the contractor, and he’s now in prison.
Under this settlement, the IRS will apologize to Trump, his doofus older sons, and the Trump Organization, but not pay them a dime in damages. Fair enough.
But then this “settlement” took a wild turn. The Justice Department set up the slush fund and gave Trump control over it. And in a separate document, it added an even more outrageous provision: The IRS cannot review Trump’s taxes, those of his family, and those of his businesses — forever. It’s essentially a cheat-at-will card that kills the agency’s longstanding policy of automatically auditing every president.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Steve Rosenthal, a former longtime senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told Politico.
A truer statement has never been uttered — about the entirety of this administration. Everybody talks about how destructive Trump is, from killing poor people overseas by eliminating USAID, to plotting to overthrow our elections, to kowtowing to the world’s autocrats, to leveraging his power to enrich his family, and so much more.
And how do we respond? We make signs, go stand at intersections and rotaries and town commons, yell “No Kings,” wave at supporters who drive by and honk, and then go home and wait for the next rally.
We’re responding to a conflagration with a squirt gun.
Don’t get me wrong: Millions of people have rallied across the country — more than 8 million as recently as March. Very impressive numbers. And maybe that turnout and passion convinced some independent voter in Arizona to stop supporting the Orange Menace.
Big deal.
Other countries seem to have this down. In France, unions’ “Yellow Vest” movement used nationwide strikes and blockades at transportation hubs, refineries, and agriculture zones to cause economic bottlenecks that forced the government to withdraw unpopular labor law changes.
Residents of certain areas of Spain and Portugal (e.g. Barcelona and Lisbon), tired of being overrun by visitors and having their lives upended by tourism, also used localized blockades to force officials to institute reasonable limits.
More extremely, the Arab Spring that started in 2010 in the Middle East and North Africa used pro-democracy protests, uprisings, and even armed rebellion to get rid of oppressive authoritarian regimes.
Look, nobody is advocating violence. And not all of the regime upheavals of the Arab Spring ended well.
But those protesters showed a pulse.
The Vietnam War protests in the US also were widespread and passionate. Led by college students, they involved massive marches, student and faculty strikes, confrontations with police and military, hunger fasts, disruptive sit-ins, vigils.
It’s one of this country’s greatest shames and tragedies that in 1970, the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four Kent State students and wounded 11 more. All of them were at a war protest on campus, and all of them were unarmed.
The murders outraged the nation and prompted a nationwide strike of more than 4 million students that shut down hundreds of colleges.
Polarization was rampant. Conservative parents disowned their liberal college kids, who in turn denounced their Nixon-supporting families. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 turned into a police riot, with beatings of protesters, journalists, and even bystanders.
The country felt chaotic. But the protests and disruptions and strikes worked.
The protests forced Americans to pay more attention to the war, and public outrage grew, making it politically unfeasible for the Nixon administration to keep the war going. Nixon was forced to speed up troop withdrawals and eventually sign the Paris Peace Accords in 1973.
The protests also influenced the political process, which is why President Lyndon Johnson didn’t run for re-election in 1968 after having spent four years dramatically escalating the war and increasing the number of US soldiers in Vietnam from 16,000 when he took office in 1963 to a whopping 500,000 by 1968.
Protests ended the military draft. Americans weren’t happy that their young sons were being forced to participate in an unpopular and deadly war. In 1973, we switched to an all-volunteer military.
The protests also changed the voting age. Young people argued that if they could be drafted at age 18 — and potentially killed — then they should be able to vote at the same age. It was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1971 via the 26th Amendment.
I would argue that none of the mass protests I’ve mentioned so far came in response to situations as dire as what we are facing now with this lawless administration. The very survival of democracy is at stake. Yet the country acts as though Trump is just a naughty little boy. We wave our signs and wave our fingers disapprovingly, then go back to life as usual.
And don’t count on elections to fix things. Trump has declared war on fair and accessible elections. He and his corrupt friends on the Supreme Court will do everything they can to sabotage this year’s midterms.
So what should be done? That’s for others who know far more about effective and meaningful protests than I do to suggest or organize. All I know is that the current level of protest is no match for the level of corruption and criminality going on. The mismatch is astounding.
None of this is normal. Please don’t ever stop being outraged.
📚 Summer Bookies
Before we get to the next installment of your suggestions, here’s an interesting mental exercise that the NY Times ran last month: Memorize a W.H. Auden poem. (h/t to Pat Christopher of Pennsylvania for pointing it out!). Check it out with this gift link.
Meanwhile, our Fast Forward Summer Bookies reading list has the theme of books about a journey: Literal, figurative, metaphorical, mythical, etc. If you haven’t sent in your suggestion yet, please do! Here are the rules:
Email your choice to thfastforward@gmail.com
One book recommendation per person, please!
List the book title and the author’s full name, followed by your name and city/town, state, country, etc.
Next, tell us briefly what the book is about and why you liked it so you can help others decide whether to read it. Please don’t copy summaries from Goodreads or Amazon; while I appreciate that, I really want your own words.
The deadline for suggestions is midnight Sunday, May 31. Again, please email your choice to thfastforward@gmail.com. I’ll publish all of your recommendations in a special edition of Fast Forward in the first week of June.
Here are more of your submissions:
“Last Bus to Wisdom”
By Ivan Doig
Linda Karmen of Falmouth, Mass.: This the story of Donal Cameron, “Donny,” a redheaded 11-year-old orphan raised by his grandmother, who is a ranch cook in the Montana Rockies in the early 1950s. When his grandmother has to have surgery, she sends Donny off by himself on a bus to grandmother’s sister, Kate, in Wisconsin. His solo journey takes him to meet Aunt Kate, who is a bossy tyrant and impossible to please; even her poor husband, Herman the German, has trouble making her happy.
When Aunt Kate has had enough of Donny, she puts him on a bus back to the authorities in Montana. Herman the German escapes on the bus with Donny, and the two meet some wonderful characters and have some glorious misadventures along the way. I laughed out loud and cried at the strange and wonderful encounters of these two unlikely traveling companions. It was a delightfully wild and funny, sweet and tender ride.
This book is not one of Ivan Doig’s series of books about the West; it is a stand alone and stands well.
“Song of Solomon”
By Toni Morrison
Brett Millier of Cornwall, Vermont: Morrison’s 1977 novel tells the story of an African American family through several generations, and the protagonist, Milkman Dead, must journey backward into those generations in order to find himself. A wonderful, wise novel with brilliantly drawn and highly memorable characters.
“Coming Through Slaughter”
By Michael Ondaatje
Scott Sieben of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada: “Coming Through Slaughter” is a semi-autobiographical novel of Buddy Bolden, a jazz pioneer (maybe invented jazz?) and talented cornet player, as he continues to develop his jazz/ragtime/open music repertoire while he deals with his own increasing debilitating mental illness. This novel is part poetry, part biography, and one of the best reads ever! This is an easy read (about 160 pages) that I HAD to read in one sitting!
“Love in the Time of Cholera”
(Spanish original: “El amor en los tiempos del cólera”)
By Gabriel García Márquez
Vesela Tutavac of Vienna, Austria: Life as a journey is an authentic Márquez theme. Love in real life is often impossible because of obstacles invented and imposed by people. In the end — as Márquez shows us — both love and life are worth the journey regardless of space and notwithstanding the age or time. Definitely a good read even in summer!
“A Time of Gifts”
By Patrick Leigh Fermor
Joel Abrams of Lexington, Mass.: This is the memoir of Fermor’s year as a teen hiking through Central Europe in 1933, on the eve of a war. But it was not written until 1977, so you get the dual perspective of an older man looking back through young eyes. And Fermor is one of those polymath Englishmen straight out of Brideshead Revisited (but less posh).
“Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor’s Life at Sea”
By Richard Henry Dana Jr.
Denault Donovan of Lynnfield, Mass.: This is a first-hand account, by Boston’s own Mr. Dana, of an 1834 voyage around Cape Horn to California (a foreign land at the time) to acquire cowhides for the shoe mills in Massachusetts. Amazing descriptions of life aboard a working tall ship and the early days of the California coast. Anyone who sails or spends any time on the water will enjoy this book. Boy, does he get homesick for Boston!!
“Into the Ice”
The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery
By Mark Synnott
Louise Berry: The story of Synnott’s journey in his own boat to retrace the 1845 British attempt to find a Northwest Passage.
More to come. Get in on our Bookies summer reading list! Recommend a good book you’ve read that’s about a journey of any type. See the submission rules above. And thanks for participating.
Hang in there, my friends.
Agree completely! Those mass mobilizations for symbolic protests should have been only the starting point, but they seem to have become an end in themselves. To be fair, a lot of people holding signs can't think of anything else to do, and they feel they just have to do *something* to make their personal statement that this is not normal or OK. How does one actually, concretely get in the way of Trump's march to fascism from a street corner in Small Town USA? The anti-Tesla actions and the anti-Avelo Airlines campaigns -- which grew from initial protests -- were effective because they organized, they focused on weakening pillars of regime support, and they had local, accessible and vulnerable targets (local airports, local Tesla dealerships) to put direct pressure on. Imagine two scenarios: In #1, A crowd of protesters turns out in the thousands in your town for No Kings Day to wave signs, feel good about it, and go home. In #2, Those same thousands summon the local District Attorney to a public meeting. They demand that the DA sign a pledge: If ICE shows up at county polling places on Election Day 2026, they will be prosecuted. That's the difference between mobilizing and organizing.
Thank you for saying out loud what some of us are thinking. We stopped going to the protests because honestly they became more of a social gathering than a protest. The European protesters focused on one issue, we are all over the place. I will keep protesting endless wars because for me this is the root of all evil.