When I say it in my head, the voice I imagine twirls the vowels into tendrils with an unconvincing French accent. My inability to maintain the vocal affectation starts to trail off into a cartoonishly French onomatopoeia: 'Huhhuhhuhhhh'.
I can understand how offense could be taken. And to speak frankly, I would seek to mitigate subjecting strangers to my stereotypical portrayal of modern anti-fascists.
That doesn’t always mean staying silent.
As I doom scroll through the morning update, my nerves fraying anew at headlines such as:
How FEMA Is Forcing Disaster-Struck Towns to Fend for Themselves
and
Trump Names More Foes He Wants Prosecuted as Bondi and Patel Look On
from The New York Times
and
Johnson describes planned No Kings rally as ‘hate America,’ ‘pro-Hamas’ gathering
From Politico …
No matter where our cursors take us, the default response to what we find upon arrival seems to be a string of not-so-colorful curses.
I find myself oddly delighted by the photographs trickling in from the so-called battle stations: sidewalks and parks where people exercising their rights to speech exercise them as loudly as possible.
In city after city, the images stop the motion of militarized agents, camouflaged, masked, and armed, confronting groups of gray-haired protestors whose leadership.
appear, at least in some of these editorial dispatches, to be wearing the uniform of an inflatable amphibian.
Moving pictures streaming virally through the interwebs that connect TikTok with whatever social media sites people of advanced age can miraculously manage, it would seem the news from our modern exodus is powered by pointed preposterousness.
Armed with tubas and trumpets, these antagonistic Americans torment their would-be oppressors with the stinging sounds of March of the Stormtroopers or the wah-wah of a Sad Clown medley.
The last time I stood along the street holding a sign, I marveled at the artful ingenuity of the people who had assembled around me. My missive, though melodic when said aloud, had too many words. It wasn’t nearly as elegant as one of my righteous neighbors held, which depicted an amazing likeness of the POTUS who would be King, complete with a liberal slathering of spray tan using just a few turbid brush strokes.
I’d like to think our democracy is capable of surviving this transparent campaign to dismantle it. But I fear our heads are so deep in the sand that we can’t just pull them out unscathed.
But we have to keep trying. We need to continually remind ourselves that the good guys don’t always win in the end, and we still need to do the hard and frightening work of dissent.
If for nothing else than for the written and photographic evidence that will eventually become this lamentable time’s permanent record of misdeeds and horrors.
As we should keep showing up for each other ... not just to witness the injustices, but to celebrate the successes, too. We should bring our floogle horns and our frog suits wherever they can lighten the mood.
And if you need a conversation starter, think about wearing a smiley-face t-shirt or an inflatable suit, if you’d like to be more formal.
A little cheek goes a long way.
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