Hands Off

The Hands Off rally in Galesburg on April 5 was a success in my view.

I saw over a hundred people there, maybe two or three hundred, though I'm no expert at counting or crowd estimation. It seemed like a lot for a busy town, though Carbondale, which is much smaller, had six or seven hundred in the pouring rain. Galesburg is a busy town, a working-class town, in my view, so when people actually come out for something like this, it's because they need to say something. That was certainly true for me.

I saw signs going in many different directions. A couple about Ukraine (mine was Greenland), a lot about social issues, one even mentioned the 401k (by the way, 401k holders lost as much as $50,000 on the day before simply because of the TH-FR-MON crash, the first two days had wiped out trillions of dollars. Hands off our retirement! Most of my friends, like me, are just coming into looking forward to a few years of kicking and using the money they'd saved over fifty years or so (unlike me; I was unable to save anything, really) - now they are in my boat, old and struggling. And angry.

I am personally more angry about the fascist tendencies, and the disregard for law, courts, and constitution. My next sign will say "I believe in the Law, the Courts, and the Constitution." Perhaps the police, knowing me, will laugh. But to me that's a big issue and I saw that, a little, on the signs. Lots of interesting signs.

You can use other sites to survey the kinds of things people said nationwide. It's a general concern 1) whether anyone notices or does anything as a result, and 2) whether the goons will come after us knowing they will be pardoned, knowing they're free from retribution. Personally, I feel that since everyone's a trillion or two poorer, a certain amount of protest willl likely be tolerated; they've got bigger problems on their plate than coming after some of us common people expressing our displeasure. But more important, I can't watch the dismantling of our democracy and do nothing. Someday we will look back on this time and say, what did you do when they were taking democracy away from you? Didn't you speak up??? I want to be able to say yes, loudly whether it did any good or not.