Afternoon Protest

The protest is at the end of our street, so my husband and I walk down and join the group. The group is eight miles of people stretching from the northern suburbs and down to the Statehouse downtown. Our neighbors brought an extra sign they made. Mine says, No Kings Since 1776. On the back it says Columbus Arborfest, which is a big festival coming up in two weeks at our neighborhood park.

Cars go by honking in solidarity at our signs. The signs are the usual. All are Welcome and No Human is Illegal and the word Fascism with an X over it and something about the president and tacos, which I don’t understand until my husband explains it to me. A helicopter flies overhead and circles back around and flies by again, and we all raise our signs, and I have the funny thought: 

What if I turn mine the other way, so it promotes the tree festival, and what if everyone standing in our eight-mile line has some kind of fun community event on the back of their signs too, and what if we are in an alternate reality, and instead of being despondent about the state of the country and having to protest against injustice and corruption and the dismantling of social services, we all wave signs about art festivals and upcoming concerts and the Columbus Zoo? 

More cars honk. People wave at us out their windows. We’re standing in front of the firehouse and a firefighter sets up a lawn chair and sits behind us, smiling like he’s watching a parade. The protest is scheduled from 2 pm to 3:30. Halfway through we’re all supposed to drop our signs, hold hands, and link our eight-mile chain together (except for going across intersections and the driveway in front of the firehouse.) 

We all do that for a few minutes. I’m thinking about the first time I went to a protest to call attention to cuts to school programming and I got thrown out of a government building and later, gave a speech through a bullhorn about how a librarian saved my life.  

And the last protest I went to, a few weeks ago, which was a rally for public library funding and protecting the freedom to read, where I met up with some of my co-workers in our library union, and one of my librarian friends held her little girl who held a little sign which said Let the Kids Read. 

And the Black Lives Matter protests during the pandemic where we all wore masks and stood six feet apart and some nice guy went across the street to the Kroger and bought a bunch of bottled water and piled it in a wagon and rolled it up and down the sidewalk offering it to everyone. 

And the Women’s March in DC in 2017 when the massive crowd lifted me off my feet and I waved my stop sign, which had one word on it, NO, and I shouted along with everyone else, "This is what democracy looks like!" and felt chills for a moment, my heart banging in my chest, my eyes burning with tears, because this IS what democracy looks like. 

Okay. It didn’t totally work. 

The state cut many of the school librarians, and the library funding and freedom to read in Ohio are still up in the air, and we all know how the other things turned out. So, I don’t know why, really, I’m parked out here in ninety billion degree weather, burning the backs of my legs off because I forgot to apply sunscreen. 

Cars keep driving by, honking, some of the honks continuing past us down the street and new honks joining those, until all you can hear is one long, blaring whir of honk-sound, and I remember

back in DC when the crowd lifted me off my feet and I looked up at the sky and saw that my NO signed had flipped upside down and said ON, and who knows how long I’d been waving it around like that, and I fixed it, but I couldn’t stop grinning like a fool, all of these beautiful people and their funny and clever and defiant signs, and I was one of them. 

I am one of them.