It's about standing up

Several years ago, I was asked to give a speech about my career to an audience that mostly consisted of fellow newspaper journalists - ink-stained wretches, one and all.

But when I started to write the speech, I got discouraged, particularly after I did some math. I figured out that in 35 years of editorial writing for four newspapers, I had written about 5,000 opinion pieces. Give or take, they added up to around 2 million words. But … I wondered. What had it all meant? At the end of the day, what had I accomplished, really? What had my words changed?

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I told my husband, Pete, about my misgivings, my doubts that all those opinions had moved the needle on anything at all, and he had an instant reply that stopped me in my tracks.

“It’s not just what you changed,” he said. “It’s what you stood for.”

I’ve been mulling over his wise answer ever since, because it doesn’t just apply to me.

It applies to all of us. Our actions and our words during this time of real peril for our democracy will express to ourselves, neighbors and the world what we all stand for.

Protest in New London. The old courthouse is the building behind the green sign. It has been long replaced by more modern facilities, but stands as a testament to the rule of law from the founding of America. Photo provided courtesy of Jerry Fischer.

This past weekend I attended the “Hands Off!” Protest in New London, Conn. I decided to take Bella, one of our two golden retrievers. Since my hands would be full just controlling her, I made her wear a sign. Because what is a protest without signs?

It looked like more than 500 were gathered around the old courthouse in New London when Bella and I arrived, with more streaming in from the nearby streets. The courthouse is a wooden structure built in 1784, just a few years after the Revolutionary War. It was constructed during the same time that the nation was being built and just beginning to find its own way as a republic. And here we were, 241 years later. Worried. Upset. But together during this moment. And trying to construct our own responses, pushing back against the chaos and crudeness of the last nearly three months of an incomprehensible second term for Donald Trump.

The signs said it all.

“Stocks down, measles up.”

“Facts over Fiction.”

“America has no Kings.”

“Nobody elected Musk.”

“Dear Canada: We hate him too!”

“Donald Trump is a Russian Asset,”

And finally:

“No sign is big enough for all the reasons I’m here.”

Amen to that last one.

Bella had a sign too, of course, which made her popular with the protestors who wanted to take her picture and pet her. It was, “Dogs against Dictators,” my tongue-in-cheek swipe at the entire ridiculous situation in which we find ourselves.

There was one man at the protest not carrying a sign at all, but an enormous Canadian flag. That did my heart good. Of all the allies he has abused, Trump’s insults against Canada make me the most irate.

I was proud of New London, because it is a town of 27,000 and yet the street in front of the courthouse was jammed. Like others in hundreds of protests across the country, people in the crowd seemed relieved to be demonstrating against the irrational actions originating from the Oval Office, and the cowering toadies in the Republican Party who are enabling Trump’s amoral power grab.

Bella, wearing her protest with pride.

I have no illusions about the change that one protest can bring about. I attended the Washington, D.C. Women’s March in 2017 when Trump first took office along with hundreds of thousands of others. I’m not sure that it did much in the end.

Yet we have to start somewhere.

We have many more things to do, but we have to go at this one step at a time. We have to make resistance a habit. Our institutions – Congress, political parties – are proving to be flimsy defenses against Trump’s onslaught. But in the history of the United States, the people lead. Citizens have made the difference long before political institutions acted: Those who have refused to be silenced, who have refused to sit in the back of the bus, who have decided not to go along in the face of injustice.

People who have stood up.

We have to act first, and sooner or later, the change will follow.

We won’t see change immediately. But we have to act anyway. Like the wise words that have been my security blanket for years:

It’s not just what we change. It’s what we stand for.