Last Saturday morning, irredeemably man, I joined the Ukiah’s Women’s March party at the courthouse. I want to add my old body to the count of those people who visibly demand equality before the government and the law.–I arrive 10 minutes before starting time and frame up the perfect courthouse crowd photo from the middle of State St. Not much vehicular traffic. Minimum-risk pic. I look toward the Beer Pub. A few people on the sidewalk, over there. Small signs, their bearers slightly huddled. Probably counter-protesters, already way outnumbered.
People characterize themselves by how they joke with strangers. “You from FBI?” a man asks me, probably as a dead-pan joke since I’m taking lots of photos, some close-ups, of the crowd thronging the west side of State. “Only if they’ve kept my Mississippi file open since ‘63.” He pauses half a beat to give me a look then moves away. I wonder “Why ask me?” Maybe I look to him like a plain-clothes ICEman. Silly notion. Maybe he’s one. Not so silly, these days. Perhaps everyone today has just the slightest sense that something could go wrong even here in Ukiah on this beautiful spring morning.
“Is that Jonathan?”
I look blankly for a moment as she takes off her wide-brimmed hat.
“Wendy! Haven’t seen you in ages!”
Wendy’s waving her sign and inviting westsiders to cross over. “We’ve got to have people on both sides of the street!” A dozen women answer her call, the immediate pull of long friendship. Flags & hand-made signs, now on both sides of State Street.
It’s now about 10:30. Wherever you stand in a jovial crowd like this one you’re in someone’s way. In this case Someone was a friend I haven’t seen since pre-covid days. “I read all your columns,” she says. I think I’m blushing.
Signs, swell because hand-made: “keep your disgusting little hands OFF MY RIGHTS” “Save Our Democracy” “You can’t spell Hatred without RED HAT’ “Hands Off Our National Parks.”–I like the short fellow’s sense of humor: “Standing Tall for DEMOCRACY” “Protect Our Social Security.”
A friend buoyantly says “It’s good to support our democracy!”
“We’ve never had one! At best we’ve had a representative oligarchy getting pushed toward democracy…but that’s a discussion for after we together vote the MAGAtites out.” He agrees & doesn’t speak the obvious if clause.
A grand march needs fine lyrics and voices. At THE march on Washington (MLK’s, 62 years ago) it was “We Shall Overcome.” A quarter of a million Americans made a vast song, at once somber and hopeful. It would spontaneously break out anywhere in that genial crowd…beginnings and endings of verses overlapping each other yet somehow making a popular anthem, too deep for tears when each separate group of marchers-for-civil rights would reach the wistful postponement, “we shall overcome…some day.”
Perhaps 750 people are at Ukiah’s not-only-women’s March. Yet I’ll testify that Roseanne Coryell Wetzell and Sarah Ryan give us pitch-perfect Woody Guthrie, and we sing him back to them, spread it around us: “This land is our land, this land is your land, from California to the New York Island”…I end up singin’ loud and somewhat in key, from the deep place. This is only time in the last ten years that Utah Phillips (“If this is our land You’d never know it Let’s get together And overthrow it”) lets me alone to sing: “this land is our land and we shall overcome…some day.”
That small group in front of the Beer Pub is with us. Has been all along, and it’s grown in size. All 4 corners of the intersection of Perkins and State are full of…I think I’ll call them affirmers, as in “I solemnly swear or affirm that I will uphold the Constitution of the United States…“. We’re a peaceful lot and have now filled all 4 corners of the intersection of Perkins and State. Some one of us keeps herding us back to the sidewalks so traffic can pass unimpeded. Many cars honk encouragement. Plenty of V gestures. Only one white pick-up lays rubber.
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