#HandsOff my state capacity

No one appreciates my humor

I attended the Saturday protests with my partner and our one-year-old daughter. She has now attended two protests, a budding responsible citizen. The energy in our city was palpable. As we approached the roundabout where the protest was held, many older people were exiting cars wearing American flag bandanas and homemade signs.

My phone battery was low so I left it on the charger and sadly missed some serious Kodak moments: little old ladies in folding chairs holding "I love my social security" signs, someone with a sign about a "muskrat" which took me entirely too long to understand, and my favorite, a quiet woman avoiding eye contact and holding a sign that read "it's so bad, the introverts are here."

I carried a sign that said "Wake up Congress," though if I had realized it was a "hands off" protest, I would have written "Hands off my state capacity," a message which I imagine virtually no one would have appreciated, even in this well-educated city. But the truth is that many of the losses we are mourning are losses not just in the social safety net, as I discussed yesterday, but losses in state capacity (such as at the Department of Health and Human Services).

As we left the protest we trailed behind a young woman in combat boots, pants that covered her entire leg, a long-sleeve jacket, a mask and a hat. She had attended the protest anonymously. I knew in the pit of my stomach that she was the wise one, concealing her identity rather than posting on her blog about her participation. She is the one who sees what is coming. Who knows what consequences we will bear in the future for having expressed ourselves today?

The important thing is to act. Many years ago, around 2006, I took a class on special interests with the scholar Diane Heith. After a relatively depressing semester of learning about the power of money in politics, she concluded the course with one sentence: "Money is a powerful force in contemporary American politics. But there is one thing that trumps money, feet." She meant that there is nothing more powerful than a mobilized citizenry.

Move your feet, America. Or lose your democracy.