Last Friday I skipped work as part of the National Shutdown, in solidarity with the people of Minneapolis. As part of the shutdown, there were protests scheduled all over the country, and I figured if I didn’t go to one then I was basically just taking a regular sick day for no reason, so I found one in Chicago. I went by myself, because I didn’t feel comfortable pressuring anyone else to stand out in the freezing cold with me. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure anyone else would show up, because the whole thing was planned so last minute and I’d had to dig to find the actual time and location of the protest. I was fully prepared to get to Daley Plaza and find like 3 guys with signs, and then maybe we’d go have a beer or something.
The plaza was packed, though. In fact, the whole thing was shockingly well organized. It seemed to be run by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who had brought a pickup truck with a PA system in it to use as a makeshift stage, and lined up about a dozen speakers from a dozen different progressive organizations. They had drummers to beat time for all the chanting, yellow-jacketed helpers to direct traffic, and not one but two emcees. There was a huge banner, like 20 feet on a side, calling for a national general strke, which had to be carried by about fifty people, walking in unison. They must have been preparing for this shit for a long time, is what I’m saying.
Before all the marching and chanting and speaking, though, while the organizers were getting ready, there was this fucking guy. This middle-aged white guy with a floppy haircut, in a brown leather jacket, carrying an acoustic guitar with stickers on it. He was angry, this guy. He was shouting at the top of his lungs, and passing out flyers. The flyers had the names of all the people who have been killed or disappeared by ICE in the last few months. I didn’t have any problem with him handing out those flyers — it’s important to remember these people — but I did have a problem with this guy, because after handing out his flyers he made everyone stand in a circle around him and listen to him try to play his guitar.
I say “try” because it was literally impossible to hear anything he sang or played. Like I said, the PSL had brought a PA system, and they were playing music on it, so all that I could hear from this guy was occasional screaming while he thrashed at the strings of his long-suffering guitar. He tried to get everyone chanting “Fuck ICE!” which, again, I agree with! But it wasn’t at the same tempo as the music on the PA, so everyone kept getting confused and trailing off. He ended up standing in the center of a wide, empty space in the crowd, surrounded by a bunch of people patiently trying to hear him, while he furiously performed an inaudible protest song for no one in particlar.
This guy, to me, exemplified a core problem with resistance in America. It’s hard to be a part of something when you need to be the center of everything. I recognized it in myself when the speakers started getting up on stage: the sense that I should be up there speaking, not down here listening. I recognized it when we started chanting, too: that I must be some kind of fool, to just be repeating back what someone on a microphone was shouting at me.
The stories of resistance that we consume are centered on individuals with massive agency: The Hunger Games, Star Wars, The Matrix, etc. As kids, we learn about the “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” where one dude on a horse singlehandedly warned all the colonists that the British were coming. But in reality, Paul was one of two dudes who started the ride, which was intended to activate a whole network of militias who all went on to alert each other. He didn’t just ride through a bunch of towns, hollering. There was a system in place, and he was a part of it.
When I was getting ready to publish Two Truths and a Lie, my agent gave me a list of people on the publishing team — typesetters, copy editors, marketing specialists, and so on — so that I could list their names in the acknowledgments. I balked at the idea of listing the names of a dozen people I’d never met in a section that I felt was supposed to be a very personal statement of thanks. But my agent explained to me that books don’t have credits the way films do, and an author’s voluntary acknowledgment of all the people who get a book ready for print is often the only public credit these workers will ever receive for their labor. People think books are written by just one person, just like they think revolutions are started by just one person. But very little is ever accomplished by a single person entirely on their own.
It’s humbling to be a part of a crowd. I felt pretty insignificant showing up to that protest by myself. But a crowd only forms when a bunch of individuals all show up in the same place at the same time. You cannot create a crowd by yourself. In fact, all that asshole with a guitar managed to create was an empty space in the middle of a crowd other people made. Don’t be that guy. Be a part of something.