Sometimes You Just Need to Show Up: The Art of Living Part II
Sundays
And show up you did.
Quick Note: I asked you to send me your pictures of the No Kings rally you attended yesterday, but I mis-typed the email address. The right one is info@marytrumpmedia.com. You can also send them to The Good in Us Substack email.
Five million Americans across 2,100 cities showed up for the first No Kings rally. Seven million Americans across 2,700 cities showed up for the second No Kings rally. Yesterday, over eight million of us across more than 3,000 cities showed up to protest the fascism and cruelty, the corruption and the illegitimacy of Donald and the Trump regime.
According to The New York Times,
the demonstrations stretched across the country, from above the Arctic Circle (Kotzebue, Alaska: population 3,000) to the tropics, in Puerto Rico. There were also 39 international No Kings rallies, according to organizers.
The 3.5% rule tells us that non-violent movements in which 3.5% of the population participate can be twice as effective as violent uprisings in effecting regime change. In the United States that would be about 12 million people showing—and we’re almost there.
But numbers won’t be enough absent “momentum, organization, strategic leadership, and sustainability.” In other words, while we grow the numbers of those getting out in the streets in defense of our democracy, our rights, and our values, we also need to protest more frequently; we need to be prepared to continue to make our presence known for the foreseeable future; and we need leaders who understand what’s at stake, who refuse to compromise, and who are willing to fight for us without pulling punches.
So let’s ensure all of those things happen. And let’s keep showing up—for our country, for our most vulnerable communities, for our future, for each other, and for ourselves. Because we have a long road ahead of us and we’re going to need to take time to give ourselves moments of joy and peace and grace.
Even though it’s a little dark, I have always found this prose poem by Charles Baudelaire, which I first read in the script of the greatest American play ever written, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, uplifting because it reminds us that we need to be realistic about the challenges we face and the means by which we can best face them. But, if possible, choose poetry and virtue:
Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you:
“It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.”
—Enivrez-Vous, Charles Baudelaire (Symons trans.)
Thank you for everything you do.
Pretty incredible!
We can all rejoice that the majority of us in this USA can demonstrate peacefully and joyfully--evidence of our power.