no kings
i didn't make it to my local protest. i could have if i planned more and tried harder, oh well. i'll call my reps on monday.
i don't have any cool ideas for like art or a poem to express solidarity or whatever (i liked this art/poem(?)). is it worth posting something still? a vapid acknowledgement that this happened and i knew about it?
i'm not sure but (i'm told) part of how protests help is that protestors meet each other and remind themselves they're not alone. oh, how not alone we are! something like 5 million1 people showed up. (if you're reading this and were one of them, i owe you a drink.) thousands showed up at the Minnesota capitol despite the shootings there and despite the organizers officially canceling the protest in response — that's thousands of people braver than i am.
maybe, however slightly, this post can help with that too?
uh, that's all i got
Sources include NPR and Strength in Numbers, who also discusses what this means, as well as cites a charming presumably-official-but-who-can-tell Google Doc. As of time of writing, Wikipedia reports 12.2 million with three citations, but I didn't find that number in any of them. Interestingly, that maybe-fake number is very close to 3.5% of the U.S. population, a somewhat famous threshold proportion of protestors that has historically led to social change according to one analysis and is also referenced on the No Kings website, though among that analysis's many caveats I believe it's more about how many are persistently engaged rather than show up for one protest, so it probably wouldn't apply here anyway. But perhaps somebody made up that number that way...↩