Usually when people announce, “Here’s the thing,” I want to ask, really? Did God stop by today with cheese danish for the both of you, to tell you what the thing was?
But here’s the thing: We’re going to need you this Saturday.
What is happening in Los Angeles with the National Guard is not simply President Trump’s brainstorm to move past the Musk scandal. It is the next step in his tryouts for autocracy.
On Saturday, Trump celebrates his birthday in Washington with a gigantic military parade, at an estimated cost of $45 million. He is a fun-loving guy. It’s “The Music Man” meets the National Day parade in Pyongyang.
So we need you to consider showing up at one of the “No Kings” protest rallies that are also being held Saturday all across America. I will be attending one, because it’s important and because it will do my hopeless heart good. It could do the same for you — lift you, remind you of who you are. You show up, we give you hope. It’s a great offer: When my grandson was little, and wanted something from me, he would put both hands on his hips, present a trade, glare fiercely, and say, “Deal?” So, deal?
We the people make the best placards — my favorites from the “Hands Off” march were “Honk if you never drunk-texted war plans” and “Now you’ve pissed off the grandmothers.” There will be the old songs of the civil rights movement and the protests that stopped the Vietnam War. It’s friendliness, right action and food trucks. Heaven.
Saturday is one week before the summer solstice, and this is how I am going to celebrate the last week of spring. I don’t approve of summer, all those mosquitoes and crop tops. If I were God, I would have skipped over it. But spring gives us green, growing, new life. Frogs start to sing again in the rains. They’ve been waiting, and all of a sudden they’re saying, I’m here, hydrated, and I’m going to tell you about it. Spring is new voices.
Winter came with MAGA. The next season will be about new leaders and orators who will emerge in this weekend’s rallies. We’ll be the frogs of springing.
People who say something can’t be done should get out of the way of the rest of us who are trying to do it.
I will celebrate the last week of spring with tens of thousands of people at the San Francisco Civic Center. Just ordinary citizens with a moral compass, we won’t have a plan or strategy to save this hurting nation, but we will show up heartsick, angry, peaceful and exuberant, the young and old, babies, the Gens X, Y and Z, people of every ethnicity, spiritual path and none at all. The love we have for this beautiful, beleaguered democratic nation will be our little light to see by, and shine.
Once a small group of people from my church, mostly old, were at a weekend retreat in the redwoods. At the end of an evening, it began to pour buckets of rain. They had to get back to their cabins in the darkness. They were OK until the lights of the retreat house faded; they were in the pitch dark. A narrow, precarious bridge separated them from their cabins, and they were afraid to cross it blind. But the youngest old man had a keychain with a tiny flashlight on it that gave off a thin beam of light, and so, holding on to each other’s shoulders and waists, guided by the thin beam of the penlight, they crossed the bridge.
I wish all the people who will meet in my city could cry together for what has been destroyed and besmirched, all the people dying since Musk got USAID dismantled. But we liberals mostly don’t cry: We fret, like little children. At least, I do.
When infants discover those tiny fingers of theirs, they jiggle the fingertips of one hand against the other and look exactly as if they are knitting. This is exactly what we will be doing on Saturday: knitting a peaceful resistance to dictatorship, to the politics of cruelty.
Remember the old bumper sticker that said, “Democracy is a verb”?
One of the old women in the dark downpour at that retreat 40 years ago was Mary Williams. I was still drinking when we first met. She adored me despite my being a walking personality disorder. Her son was in prison, her health precarious, and she was poor, but when she was sad, she always told me, no matter how dark her life, “Annie, I know my change is gonna come.” And it would.
I lived on a tiny houseboat and had almost no money; Mary lived in the projects. She would bring me little baggies full of dimes, sealed with twist ties. I got sober, and then had a baby, without a husband or a steady income. But whenever life felt too hard, I’d see or remember Mary at the altar, sharing her hardships and pain, announcing, “But I know my change is gonna come.” It always did: a second wind, a visit from an old friend.
When my baby was 3, a book of mine took off unexpectedly, and I explained to Mary that we were doing better now. But she still brought me those baggies. She knew I didn’t need the money, but that I needed the dimes.
I am looking at one of those bags on my bookshelf now — I’ve saved it all these years — and man, do I need the dimes more than ever — faith, love, hope; good people. Our change is gonna come, maybe not next Thursday right after lunch, but it will, if we stick together, don’t give up, and keep taking the next right action. Remembering this will be the gift of Saturday’s protest march. So here’s the thing: You who are terrified, sad, exhausted and just plain gobsmacked? Maybe show up on Saturday. Come democracy with us.
Anne Lamott, an author of fiction and nonfiction, lives in Marin County. Her latest book is “Somehow: Thoughts on Love.” X: @annelamott
