Contra how I act in my political rants to friends on facebook or in comfortable small situations, I am really shy with strangers and hate confrontation. I heard Friday night about my Congressman's town hall (McClintock, in Roseville, CA) and realized that I had to go, or admit to myself I didn't really care as much as I was asserting I did. But the prospect terrified me.
I thought about what good it would do, and I came up with "because the people at next week's rally, wherever it is, have to go to theirs, and I will add to the numbers at this one and encourage them." That's part of it, but there turns out to be another reason.
Anyway, yesterday morning I dragged myself out of bed, feeling "oh god am I actually going to go do this?" I dithered over coffee and breakfast and posted some dumb things on Facebook. And finally realized I had to go. (It was only a couple miles away and literally down the street. I really, really had no available excuse.)
I parked a couple blocks away just so I could walk for a bit and feel a little more comfortable.
And then I was waiting at the light, across the street from the protest, with five other mutual strangers. A police SUV had closed the road and there was an officer directing traffic. Most of the next block of the street was filled with people and signs. And one person standing there said to the rest of us "wow, a lot of people." And another said "Are they there protesting against Trump?" And I shrugged and said "well, *I* hope so." And everyone smiled and laughed and nodded.
And that was all it took. From there on I was in a place I wanted to be.
I looked at the crowd and decided I wanted a picture (because I'm still not really comfortable in the middle of a crowd). Next to the theater was a parking garage, so I went up the outer stairs. There were people on the landing, watching, and I chatted with them - a Vietnam-era protest veteran and a few other folks.
I got to the roof and took the picture, and tweeted it. (This particular tweet got ignored because I had 10 followers on twitter yesterday and they're all people I already know who also have about 10 followers each. I reposted it later in the day...)
Then I went down to the crowd and hung out. The modal person there was fiftyish and female. There were children on shoulders, some elderly folks commenting that the last time they'd done this was over Watergate and Vietnam, and a whole lot of gratified surprise that a place like Roseville would turn out a crowd like this.
I commented about that to a few people. "I've seen one other political protest in Roseville. Eight years ago, by the post office. Four old guys in tricorn hats."
I tweeted several more times, because I've heard the verb "to live-tweet" and figured I wasn't dead.
I don't know how to convey how amazing it is to walk through a crowd of people, overhear bits of conversation that is almost exclusively about politics, and realize that nobody is saying anything stupid, offensive, ignorant, or hurtful. Just airing their personal stories and worries with each other. People said "2018" a *lot.*
Roseville is pretty damn lily-white. That crowd had black and Hispanic and Asian (south and east both) and Middle Eastern faces - not a lot, but some.
There were rumors flying around about what was going on inside, but nobody actually knew and most of the rumors turned out to be false.
There were a couple people sharing a bullhorn that didn't really seem to work well. A couple times there were some crowd chants (e.g. "This is what democracy looks like") but there was literally no one screaming or looking like they had even the possibility of doing anything violent. There was about as much danger as for a crowd waiting for a store with a big sale to open its doors.
I was there for about an hour, listening and watching and smiling and a couple times clapping and winding up in conversations that everyone was having; everybody wanted new people to join their conversations and hear each other's stories and inputs.
I went home once the crowd thinned out; there was some effort to go find the place where the congressman was going to exit, and I followed one of the groups around behind the parking garage, but I was less comfortable with being a part of that (it was all very civil, just standing there, some with signs, but the smaller group didn't have the same community sense, so my desire to go home reasserted itself.) Rumors (that turned out to be false) had said he'd found a secret way out, anyway.
Turns out after I left, he went out the front, escorted by something like twenty police officers. There's video. One person tried to get in front of him and be rude. None of those people in that crowd posed a physical danger to the Congressman. But I can understand why he felt threatened - especially after what turned out, I understand, to have been a pretty raucous hour inside.
Once I got home, one of the many politically influential twitter feeds I follow had a link to the local NPR political reporter, who apparently was also there, so I shared my crowd picture in reply to her. And then my tweet with the picture (the tweet contains two numeric factual errors, or 1 error per 70 characters, so I really covered myself in glory there) winds up on the Huffington Post and TalkingPointsMemo and suddenly this post gets over a thousand likes, four hundred retweets, and I have three times as many Twitter followers this morning, and part of me now regrets making my Twitter account with my real name but what the hell I'm white and male and even if I'm a liberal I know people who are armed.
But my point - and I do have one - is this.
It is a huge morale boost to yourself to go to one of these things and it is so worth it.
Everyone feeling stressed or depressed or scared about this election - i.e. every single one of you - should go to the next one of these. The next rally, protest, demonstration, whatever. It has an amazing effect on the people who go - and then, through its success and through the media reporting its success, has a secondary positive effect on everyone who hears about it.
I did my part yesterday, for the first time. All of you, go do yours. You will not regret it - you will be glad you did.