Photograph Source: David Geitgey – CC BY 2.0

I’m not an expert in assessing crowd density, but a half hour before the scheduled No Kings demonstration in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, hundreds had already gathered on Main Street. An hour later, the number seemed to be in excess of 1,000.

I was hesitant to attend the rally, but it’s become second nature to demonstrate after so many decades. Sitting and sulking in the face of the Trump dictatorship was not an option. The crowd was happily noisy with a range of signs noting the revulsion of demonstrators to the Trump administration’s increasing fascism. Besides the anti-monarchist bent of No Kings, there were signs attacking the Trump administration’s penchant for supporting war, his attacks against immigrants, the fundamentalist reaction against women’s rights, along with support for medical coverage for all, among the other sentiments against outrages of the government in Washington, D.C. There were no speakers at this rally, and sadly, no marching among the tourist crowds that gather at this, the most popular small town in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. About a half hour into the demonstration, a fairly large gray-white drone hovered above the crowd and moved away about 100 yards north on Main Street. I have no idea of the source of the drone, but it did not look like an inexpensive model. I thought that the lack of privacy and the ability of all kinds of official forays into private information allowed many government agencies to know exactly who was at this particular demonstration. That’s a daunting reality!

My wife Jan and I did not carry signs and stood close to the front of the crowd bordering Main Street. Someone approached us and asked if we’d like materials to make poster-board signs.

“What we are seeing from the Democrats is some spine,” Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, a key organizing group, told the Associated Press. “The worst thing the Democrats could do right now is surrender” (“Millions across all 50 US states march in No Kings protests against Trump” Guardian, October 18, 2025). But the reality on the ground today as the No Kings rallies took place was that the Democrats, mostly spineless and doing the bidding of wealth, power, and the warmongers, paved the way for the far right we see frighteningly clear before us. Only a small number of Democrats across the US dare to step out of line and fight power and wealth.

Just three days before this rally, I celebrated the anti-war Vietnam era’s first Moratorium Against the War demonstration that took place 56 years earlier. Twelve hours later, I would be on a plane carrying me to basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. There was a brief stop at the reception station at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where the anti-war physician, Dr. Howard Levy, had been convicted of refusing to train special forces members who were destined to take part in the Vietnam War. He would be jailed for several years for his act of resistance. I marched down College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, with a contingent of students from Brown University, although I was a senior at Providence College about five miles across the city. Trying to hold the idea of both demonstrations in my mind proved difficult because the October 15, 1969, rally took place at the peak of the anti-war movement, and demands for peace were far more strident than at today’s rally. One person at the Great Barrington rally held a sign that read “Member of the radical lunatic left.” The Trump administration and its far-right allies had been libeling and slandering milquetoast liberals over their criticism of Trump and his policies. Trump used the wide brushstroke of hate to symbolically tar and feather critics. There was a definite similarity in that message to the 1960s attacks against protesters. Recall Richard Nixon’s slander of the martyrs from 1970 at Kent State as “bums.”

This from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.” I tried to keep that thought in mind with the two October rallies in view.

Rallies are great, bringing people of like sentiments together, but Douglass was onto something. Looking at the likelihood of the last remnant of the 1965 Voting Rights Act being decimated by today’s far-right Supreme Court, it seems that power on the far right likes to take back that which it once conceded. The civil rights movement was based on faith groups, to an extent, but today’s religious fundamentalists are far removed from any sense of a moral compass or the trajectory of history bending toward the good and the right arc of justice.

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