By Robert C. Koehler
Shouts and cheers, honking horns, people banging on drums. Oshkosh! No kings – at least not today. I’m with my sister and great nephew, attending the nearest national rally, about 20 miles south of their home in Appleton, Wisconsin. I’m up here with them because I’m getting cataract surgery (left eye tomorrow), but what the heck, Saturday is open. Let’s go to the No Kings rally.
One of multi-thousands of rallies across the country. Oh, yes!
More than a thousand people are crowded in the park in the center of town. Most of them are holding signs. The collective vibration is enormous. Honk! Honk! Save the country! But as we walk among them, as the cheers and claps reverberate, I can’t stop feeling small and cynical – by myself, a spectator among the participants. Does creating change amount to nothing more than joining the cheers?
I don’t want to feel cynical. This is a crucial event. My God, we can’t shrug and surrender the country to the idiots and racists, the billionaire warmongers. I want to feel myself expand spiritually, become part of . . . what? The anti-Trump, we’re-better-than-you-guys movement? No, that’s not why I’m here. That’s not why we’re here. I sigh. The drums beat. We keep wandering through the park, looking at the signs. Lots of them are basically middle fingers to the president: “No crown for the clown.” “Elect a rapist. Expect to get fucked.”
And then I see this one: “Power to the people. No one is illegal.”
And suddenly everything changes. I’m no longer a spectator. The words are simple – they’re cliches, right? Peace and love, blah, blah, blah. No matter that I’d heard these words a million times. In this context, amidst the cries and cheers, the honks and drumbeats of endless enthusiasm, the words – this simple truth – came to life. And I started to cry.
Huh? Oh my God. Much to my amazement, I was no longer on the outside of the rally, no longer just a spectator observing a protest. No one is illegal. Suddenly the words had political resonance. Suddenly I found myself envisioning a future in which they were true. I wasn’t angry and alone with them but part of a wave of awareness. The honking car horns, the beating drums, the shouts and cries, were a thousand-plus people – nationwide, worldwide, multi-millions of people – embracing the dispossessed and rejected among us and creating a world, this very moment, in which no one is illegal. No one is collateral damage. No one is less than human.
My tears at the Oshkosh rally were a moment of micro-awareness: Truth in its enormous complexity is escaping the shackles of cliché. This is what it means to “tear down that wall” – the wall of smug political certainty. This is one planet. We’re still learning to live with each other on it.
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.
