This is a crossover post from my other newsletter FUGITIVE. If you like this kind of writing or are searching for ways to engage with the news beyond breaking news, please consider checking it out!
As I was walking to get coffee this morning, small clusters of people were protesting along Connecticut avenue. It was gray out, the kind of half-hearted drizzle that has you opening and closing your umbrella.
Let me set the scene for you: Connecticut avenue is a major thoroughfare that runs through several Northwest D.C neighborhoods and extends into Maryland. If you were to step out at 9am on a weekday morning, you’d find it choked with commuter traffic. It’s one of the diagonal avenues that radiates from the White House like a point in a star.
On this morning, a parade of cars sped past honking their horns in support of the protests. The protestors were mostly senior citizens holding handwritten signs that read things like, HANDS OFF THE FREE PRESS. HANDS OFF MEDICAID. HANDS OFF DEMOCRACY. (I’d later learn these protests were called “Hands Off.” Roughly 1,000 sister demonstrations had been planned across the country, but the biggest one was expected to take place not too far away on the National Mall).
I thought two things as I passed the protestors at each intersection: 1) that political activism has no age and 2) who and what is protest for?
These protestors would’ve been in their teens or early twenties in the sixties. Were they protesting then, too? Or did activism arrive later in life? What was the catalyst, the inflection point, that made them get up one morning, throw on a coat, sign folded under their armpit, and go out to the street?
The thought that some of these protestors may have been demonstrating for decades—South African apartheid in the 90s. AIDS in the 80s. Vietnam in the 70s. Civil Rights in the 60s—was an expansive one.
That even after not achieving their desired outcome, they kept asserting their right to demand a different one.
But I also wondered who these protests were for. At any one corner, there were only about three or four protestors. And this end of upper Northwest isn’t particularly populated. By city standards, it’s a bit out of the way.
When demonstrators rally in front of government buildings, encamp on campus lawns, common wisdom suggests protests are for the protested.
But walking down Connecticut avenue, hearing the horns sound off in solidarity, hands flying out the windows to wave, I saw the other side of the coin: protest is as much for the protested as it is for the protestors and the people who support them.
I wrote about hope in my last post, how it’s rarely sustained in solitude. This was an object lesson in that philosophy.
The right to protest has been top of mind for me this week.
As part of a my day job, I produced a show about the dozen international students and faculty at universities around the country who’ve been arrested and detained by I.C.E., many of whom expressed pro-Palestinian views or protested against the war in Gaza. All legal permanent or temporary U.S residents. Like every individual in this country, they are protected by the first amendment. Like every American, they have the right to protest.
To protest is to say no. But it’s also to say yes to those with a shared vision: the honking horn, the hand waving out the window.
Even though I was not protesting, the protest implicated me, as protests ultimately aim to do.
It struck me that these displays are not just for the recipient of the protestors’ ire or the protestors. They’re also for the person passing by on their way to grab coffee, who’s now looking up.
This is a crossover post from my other newsletter FUGITIVE. If you like this kind of writing or are searching a way to engage with the news without reading the news, please considering checking it out!
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