Meeting the Moment

A brief report from New York on the national day of protest.

Hands Off Trans Kids! Eden, Janine and Jim, CC by 2.0, via Flickr

Dear Friends,

This letter comes to you a day late. I can’t quite blame it on my parakeet, though he is climbing all over the keyboard, making it hard to type. Instead, I find that writing about this national moment often tangles me up, and always slows me down.

I want to meet the moment, but the moment is hard to meet!

Recently I’ve been trying to expand my sense of political action, thinking and writing about care as a form of attention and the political potency of holding true to ourselves.

Even so, when the moment calls for going into the streets, it calls for going into the streets.

— Sal

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Saturday in New York

This Saturday I walked down Fifth Avenue in New York as part of a massive crowd at the Hands Off protest.

I was there with members of my zendo, joining with the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy. It was heartening to gather, it was heartening to be among so many people protesting our national disaster.

There were people marching to protect democracy, to protect social security, to protect science and libraries, to protect trans kids and LGBTQ+ rights. There were people marching to prevent the unlawful deportation of immigrants, to stop the destruction of Gaza and its people, to free Mahmoud Khalil. Many signs mocked and derided the would-be-dictator and his minions. There were labor unions and veterans, percussion groups and a bagpipe band, kids in strollers and older people bent over their walkers.

It was a chilly day, raw and drizzly, and we were all a bit under-dressed. The crowd was so dense as we shifted from Bryant Park to Fifth Avenue that we could barely take a step and our group split apart in the Brownian motion (luckily, I was wearing a very orange hat, which helped us find each other again). I saw exactly two policepersons all afternoon and there were no barricades along our route — it seemed that the sheer size of the march surprised everyone involved.

Aerial shots of the march showed that it filled twenty blocks of Fifth Avenue; estimates were that a hundred thousand people showed up.

Afterwards, far-flung Village Zendo members sent in pictures and reports of unprecedentedly large protests in Iowa City, San Diego, Hyannis, New Haven, Scranton, Redbank, Saugerties, and Warwick, New York. Reports say there were about 1300 simultaneous protests around the nation.

All of us who gathered together on Saturday are aware that no one march is enough to change what is happening. Still, it was moving and encouraging to be together, to see and feel each other in the act of speaking up and resisting.

We Are Not Acquiescing

A couple of days ago I was listening to a dharma talk by Norman Fischer, recorded in March. Lately, he’s been taking a few minutes at the beginning of his talks to speak to the national situation. He started by reading a new poem, a protest poem, and then said:

To me, the government's actions are cruel. Cruel. And they're having bad effects on lots of people, many of whom I know well and love. And they may have even worse effects as we go forward. And I find it really hard to see it otherwise. And then, we read of these efforts to bully and intimidate all opposition to this regime. And those efforts are really objectionable. I find them morally repugnant.

And as I've been saying pretty much every week, I believe that all of us who feel this way—recognizing that not everybody does—should say so, in whatever way that we uniquely can, so that it will be clear that we are not indifferent, and we are not in agreement, or acquiescing with what is happening, that we perhaps, at the moment, can't do very much, if anything, to prevent.

It’s not clear, yet, what we can or can’t prevent, what we can protect, what we can save from destruction. Even as the damage to our nation grows, there are signs that resistance is having an effect. I am inspired by the historical work of Erica Chenoweth who found that once sustained nonviolent civil movements spread through enough of the population (3.5%), they are virtually always capable of bringing down repressive regimes.

In the meantime, we can make clear to ourselves and each other that we are not in agreement, and we are not indifferent.

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Some Inspiration

Patti Smith: The people Have The power.

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Erica Chenoweth: The success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance.

More Erica Chenoweth.

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How are you meeting the moment?