Marble Falls       Organizers and reports are labeling the recent No Kings events as the largest single protest in American history.  Reportedly there were 3300 events with attendance ranging between 8 and 9 million people.  No question, that’s big.  The organizers behind Indivisible, that arose widely around the country during Trump’s first term, have kept their drive alive for the second term, and it’s showing.

Sure, one could quibble.  These are parades, not protest marches.  There are no targets or demands, not really.  For Trump, they are water off a duck’s back.  All that is true, but on the plus side there are some real takeaways that are worth our attention.

The geographic breadth of these actions is fascinating.  They represent a gathering of the tribes in their wide distribution.  There’s solidarity with a national purpose.  Even when small and an inch deep, they are still a mile wide, including in the reddest states, forcing Trump sycophants to reckon with opposition that otherwise it is ignoring.  Looking at Arkansas and Louisiana for example, sure there were parades in Little Rock, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge, but there were also actions in Walmart’s heartland in the Ozarks, Harrison, Bentonville, Springdale, and of course Fayetteville.  In central Arkansas, Conway, Russellville, and even Nashville where only 4000 people live.  Similarly in Louisiana, there was activity in Alexandria, Lafayette, Shreveport, and Monroe.  There were 19 events scheduled in Arkansas and 11 in Louisiana, and it looks like they came together.

Pushing against the administration, one can see signs of life, and dare we say resistance, in the Trump heartlands where marchers were stretching their sea legs to get ready for the midterms and the chance for change.  This is not a political party thing, and that’s also what’s interesting.  Sure, the headliners with Bruce Springsteen in Minnesota were a bunch of their elected leadership, but around the country these were the people who stand out and stand up and mostly don’t get in the streets, even if they may not fit easily with the majority.  That’s interesting to me.  If organized and supported on the long march, that adds up to something very real.

Lord knows, every ACORN convention or big action with a disciplined, well-trained staff it was still a heckuva job to get all the numbers both before and after counted and verified.  The strength of the No Kings effort is it’s ability to encourage and support a thousand flowers blooming across the country.  The weakness is the same, even while encouraging everyone to do something where they are, means that there’s also no efficient way to determine exactly what happened in these thousands of places or to coordinate and implement next steps in those communities.  On the No Kings website many of the projected activities were simply folks throwing a meeting place up against the wall and hoping to see if people would show up.

All praise to the fact that it worked, but that doesn’t mean you can bottle it up and apply at will.  No Kings shows that people want to take action.  This one was bigger than the last.  Hooray.  Now what?