By Robert C. Koehler
Shouts and honking horns . . . and a country being born?
Hey, hey, ho, ho . . . I don’t know. It’s been four days ago, as I write, that the second No Kings rally was held across the country – across the world. I can still hear the blaring horns; they sounded like music. Something fused and bubbled in the blare, a sense of connection and shared values, that isn’t going away. That was the uniqueness of this rally, or so I hope and feel at some deep place in my heart.
I attended the rally, with my sister and two friends, in Appleton, Wisconsin, where I now live – one of about 2,700 such rallies across the country. The several thousand people packing the streets of downtown Appleton were part of the seven million people throughout the country who felt called upon to – shall we say? – join the future. This is my takeaway. This is why I’m writing about the rally today. Yeah, it’s over. But it’s not “done.”
No faux king way!
Excuse me as I quote one of the signs at the rally – one of thousands of angry and heartfelt cries put into words at the event. No Kings – a continuation of the rally held in June – was, as far as I’m concerned, an act of creative participation. We’re still in the process of creating our country.
So let me toss in a few more signs that I saw. The spirit and message of these signs fell into several categories. The first, unsurprisingly, was defiance:
- Resist like it’s 1938 in Germany
- No kings, no Nazis
- I hope the Big Beautiful Bill is his cellmate
And a zillion more, of course. Fury at DJT is unsurprising. Especially in the wake of his decision to “invade” American cities and turn desperate emigrants – indeed, brown-skinned people of every sort, including legal residents and American citizens – into the new enemy. And beyond that, Trump’s lust for power and his ability to herd together countless sycophants is consuming what’s left of American democracy and opening a door to God-knows-what, sometimes referred to as fascism. Collectively standing up to this is critical. No kings . . . no corporate oligarchs.
But there was more to the rally than fury and defiance, which is why I feel the need to write about it. As I say, this was a collective act of creative participation. What I truly and most deeply felt as I stood with my friends and loved ones in the middle of it, amid the endless cheers and honking, was the ongoing birth of national values. I felt them transcend political abstraction and come alive. A second category of signage could be described simply as: Who are we?
- Power to the peaceful
- Diversity equals strength
- The greatest threat to democracy is indifference
- No one is illegal on stolen land
- How society treats its most vulnerable is the measure of its humanity
In the context of the rally, these were not simply nice-sounding words, shrugs of hope. I felt something far more significant, far more vibrant, in them. This is who we are. And this is what our country must be: Not an ever-fearful empire wannabe, defined by its declared enemies, manifested by its military budget and its impenetrable borders, symbolized by masked ICE agents and white Christian nationalists calling for war in the name of God, but . . .
Let’s just say, people with a soul-deep love for Planet Earth and all who inhabit it. This is the nation I felt coming to life at the rally.
Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.
