I Went to a Protest

The protest was in my neighborhood, a three-minute walk from where I live. It was raining. I knew the protest was going on, and I didn’t want to go, but then I did. I don’t know how many of these I’ve been to over the past ten years. 

The big one, the Women’s March in DC in 2017, the Black Lives Matter protests during the pandemic when we all stood six feet apart and sweated behind our masks. Marches against gun violence and Kings. Rallies in support of women’s rights and LGBTQ and immigrants. A rally for public libraries.  

I used to be gung-ho about protests. I would yell and wave my sign. After a while I stopped yelling. This time I didn’t bother bringing a sign. I am angry, but it’s a diffused kind of anger that is more on the sad side. I don’t have the belief anymore that protesting accomplishes anything by itself. 

I have a body, though, and I can plant myself in a crowd and be one more person if anyone decides to count us. In the crowd you are reminded that you are not alone. You stand side by side with these strangers, and suddenly, they’re not strangers anymore. They’re your neighbors. They’re angry and sad too. Of course, we all feel angry and sad. We witnessed a person’s murder. 

After the protest, I went home and did a frenzy of cleaning and purging, carting boxes of stuff off to Goodwill. Old games no one plays anymore, old suitcases (why do we have so many suitcases?) A tub of stuffed animals, which weirdly had me reminiscing, fondly, about the early weeks of the pandemic, when someone in the neighborhood asked if people would put teddy bears in their windows. 

She said her kids were restless and scared and they were taking a lot of walks, and wouldn’t it be nice if they could go on a kind of teddy bear hunt. I loved this idea and quickly gathered all of our old stuffed animals and set them up in the windows, and then it was like a parade of sorts, the whole neighborhood, it seemed, out and waving at bears.  

People were walking in family groups back then, everyone staying respectfully socially distant. I went for a lot of walks too, crisscrossing the street whenever another group came toward me. You wouldn’t believe how many houses had stuffed animals in their windows. It made me want to cry.

Once I came upon a child’s birthday party, a porch decorated with balloons and streamers, a little girl standing on the front steps, smiling at her friends as they drove by and dropped off presents. Another time I stood with the dog and listened to a man tutor a middle school aged boy. He was sitting in a chair on one side of a front lawn and the boy was sitting in a chair on the other side. They were working through a math problem together.   

I don’t know why I keep forgetting that there is more good in the world than bad. Okay, maybe it’s closer to a fifty-fifty ratio, and the good only beats out the bad by a sliver, but the sliver is what we have to hold onto. 

The people who delight in harming others would like nothing better than for us to join them. But something I learn at every protest is that we are not the ones who are afraid. 

We are the ones who stand with our neighbors.