This is a post and the first comment. It's about protests and how to do them. READ IT!!!
--Kim
Oliver's Post
There are those among us—not shadows of some distant past, but living, breathing architects of decline—who would see our way of life extinguished. Who would turn democracy to dust, choke the strivings of a more perfect union, and unravel the hard-won tapestry of progress: toward inclusion, toward compassion, toward truth, toward justice. They seek to drag us backward, to unmake what was painfully made.
Today, we bear witness to their works. We see agents of a regime—masked, unaccountable, stripped of both legal and moral legitimacy—descending like specters into our neighborhoods, seizing people from their homes, from sidewalks, from sanctuary. Most are targeted for nothing more than the color of their skin. These are not scenes from fiction. This is the here. This is the now.
We watch as a festering nest of parasitic grifters and fundamentalist theocrats tightens its grip—a cabal rotting from the inside, preaching sermons of subjugation while carving away rights like meat from bone. They work with methodical cruelty, reversing a century of human progress with the stroke of a pen, dragging us toward a world where women bleed without autonomy, where the queer are hunted in broad daylight, where education is devoured by propaganda, and where liberty dies not with a bang, but with endless bureaucratic whispers.
We see the technocrats and oligarchs, perched in their glass towers, their smiles polished and hollow, gazing down on us as numbers, as patterns, as spreadsheets to be optimized. They speak in the cold tongue of data, of markets, of efficiency. But in their calculus, humanity itself vanishes. They have no use for tenderness, for grief, for the priceless mystery of a life. In their world, empathy is noise. Compassion is risk. And the soul is a liability.
And beneath it all—the rot. Not a crack in the system, but the system as designed. The roots are sick. The branches creak. The fruit is poison. Centuries of injustice are returning now, not as ghosts, but as consequence.
And still, more dangerous than the jackboot or the ledger is the creeping anesthesia of despair. The soft, seductive voice that says: This is the way of things. Nothing can be done. That voice is the final weapon. That voice is how the battle is lost.
But we—we must remember.
We must remember the enslaved, whose stolen labor built empires, whose names were stripped from their tongues, whose pain was turned into currency. We must remember the Indigenous, exiled from their lands, erased from their own histories, buried beneath lies and asphalt and monuments to their erasure. We must remember those herded into camps, marked as vermin, silenced by gas and gunfire and starvation, their lives a testament to the abyss that awaits when cruelty is crowned.
We must remember ourselves, too—who we were before the world taught us to forget.
We were all children once. We came into this world wide-eyed, limbs flailing with joy, marveling at the softness of grass, the shape of clouds, the magic of breath. We were not born with hate in our hearts. We did not come into this life to dominate or destroy. We were simply here, and that was enough.
And that part of us is not gone. It sleeps, perhaps, beneath layers of grief and cynicism, but it waits for us. It is still there. And now—now is the time to dig. Past the rage. Past the fear. Past the numbness. Down to the ember that still glows.
Think of those you love. The ones who picked you up when you fell, who made you laugh until your stomach hurt, who reminded you why this fragile, fleeting thing we call life is worth defending. Let them be your compass. Let them be your reason.
That is your armor now. That is your sword.
No, I don't have all the answers. I don't know every step forward. But I do know this:
We stand on a precipice.
We can look away. Or we can rise. Not in chaos. Not in blind rage. But in clarity, in compassion, in relentless resolve.
Now is the time to rise.
Rise in your own way. Loud or soft. In protest, in policy, in poetry. In care, in kindness, in organizing, in art. Whatever your gift—bring it. We need it.
And do not give them what they want. Do not let them provoke you into violence. That is the story they crave—to paint us as monsters so they can justify their own. Deny them their excuse. Stand unyielding. Stand principled. Make them tremble not with fear, but with the knowledge that they cannot kill what is true and just.
We owe it to those before us. We owe it to those beside us. We owe it to those who are yet to be.
And when our children ask what we did—
we can say, simply:
We remembered who we were. And we chose to fight and care for each other.
Cin Diam
I am not the author of this however some thoughts I think are very good. This is copied, I hope it's not too long.
Zen priest, Peter Coyote, on protest: "I'm watching the Los Angeles reaction to ICE raids with trepidation and regret.
Three years ago I taught a class at Harvard on the "theater of protest"— designed to help people understand why so many protests turn out to be Republican campaign videos working directly against the interests of the original protest.
A protest is an invitation to a better world.
It's a ceremony.
No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they're being screamed at.
More important you have to know who the real audience of the protest is.
The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, Congress,etc.
The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them.
If you win them, you win power at the box office and power to make positive change.
Everything else is a waste.
There are a few ways to get there:
1. Let women organize the event. They're more collaborative. They're more inclusive, and they don't generally bring the undertones of violence men do.
2 Appoint monitors, give them yellow, vests and whistles. At the first sign of violence, they blow the whistles and the real protester sit down.
Let the police take out their aggression on the anarchists and the provocateurs trying to discredit the movement.
3. Dress like you're going to church. It's hard to be painted as a hoodlum when you're dressed in clean, presentable clothes.
They don't have to be fancy they just signal the respect for the occasion that you want to transmit to the audience.
4. Make your protest silent. Demonstrate your discipline to the American people. Let signs do the talking.
5. Go home at night. In the dark, you can't tell the cops from the killers. Come back at dawn fresh and rested.
I have great fear that Trump's staging with the National Guard and maybe the Marines is designed to clash with anarchists who are playing into his hands and offering him the opportunity to declare an insurrection.
It's such a waste and it's only because we haven't thought things through strategically.
Nothing I thought of is particularly original.
It was all learned by watching the early civil rights protests in the 50s and 60s.
And it was the discipline and courage of African-Americans that drew such a clear line in the American sand that people were forced to take sides and that produced the civil rights act.
The American people are watching and once again if we behave in ways that can be misinterpreted, we'll see this explained to the public in Republican campaign videos benefiting the very people who started this.
Wake up.
Vent at home.
In public practice discipline and self control.
It takes much more courage."
— Peter Coyote
Zen teacher and author/narrator, with Ken Burns
Note: Carry an American flag. As the administration creates a fake emergency to justify a state crackdown, it's important to honor the values and vision of democracy for which we're advocating.
When the Enquirer came for pics back in 2017, I smiled a big toothy grin and held a big flag as it felt so empowering and good to stand with my adult daughter, pastors, Franciscans, nuns, kids, parents, grandparents and some women from our women's groups for the values we tried to pass on.
After the protest, we sang and marched to a church where we heard poignant witness of immigrants trying to build a better life for their families against insurmountable odds.
Many Marines, National Guardsmen and vets are over on Threads and Substack expressinging their disagreement over being used by this lawless administration.
Peace, santi and shalom to all. 
— Leslie Flood Hershberger
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