MY LIFE IS IN PROTEST

I ran from tear gas and was arrested at People's Park, occupied Wall Street, and wore a pussy hat. Now I'm 77, and I can't imagine stopping.

- Mark Jacobson

THE SOCIAL UNREST that used to be called “the long hot summer” goes on all year round now, 24/7, but even by the whiplash standards of Trump II, it was a hectic news cycle. It was June, and $2 billion B-2 bombers were dropping bunker busters on Iran, setting off what some imagined to be the opening rounds of World War III. In Minnesota, a state representative and her husband had just been shot dead in their home; a state senator and his wife had been shot and injured. Out in L.A., home to the Zoot Suit Riots, Watts, and Rodney King, hundreds were protesting ICE, whose agents were snatching up allegedly undocumented day laborers and street vendors—even a union leader—and sending them off to parts unknown. In response, Trump brought in the National Guard—against the wishes of the governor, the first time a president had done so since 1965—as well as 700 Marines, lest Tinseltown be “burned to the ground.”

NOVEMBER 1965: I was 17 when these guys set fire to their draft cards at Union Square.

Meanwhile, across the country, the opposition was ramping up. Millions more protesters were taking to the streets, declaring June 14, Trump's birthday, to be “No Kings Day,” waving homemade signs, chanting slogans, summoning slivers of hope. On a subway platform in Brooklyn, a crowd waiting to go to a rally spontaneously broke into a chorus of “This Land Is Your Land,” the song Woody Guthrie used to play on his guitar with THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS written on the body. The struggle for what America is, what it might become, was back on. As many had come to believe, the future was at stake.