Spring 2025. I head over to the median strip of West Street at Christopher to participate in a small weekly “action” I’ve just learned about. I choose a hand-lettered sign from the organizer’s bag that reads HONK IF YOU LOVE DEMOCRACY. For the first time since elementary school, someone hands me a tambourine.
Goldilocks-like, I’ve been sampling an array of protest groups since the inauguration, trying to find the right fit. As I watch Trump hack at our democracy, I feel desperate to be part of the solution and not the problem, but also not sure how to be effective, given that I don’t like to get in people’s faces and my schedule is already full with work that I feel is important.
Honking for democracy on the West Side Highway median seems constructive, like the actions this one was modeled on: cheering on essential workers during the pandemic and rescue workers after 9/11. I figure most New Yorkers believe in democracy, at least more than they believe in, say, feudalism. But now I’m watching as the administration and its enablers sidle right up to autocracy, and I’m no longer sure what people believe.
We’re a tiny group, headed up by a college professor with a walker and long white hair. I station myself to face the south-going traffic. Many drivers honk, and I give a thumbs up or bang the tambourine, feeling very Davy Jones. The majority ignore me as they wait at the red light. One driver makes eye contact and slowly shakes his head no, back and forth, for the endless duration of the light. One gives me the finger. Two drivers, and one pedestrian coming inland from the river, yell f*ck you.
Villagers hold strong opinions and can be a hotheaded bunch, so I’m not a stranger to verbal and gestural abuse. For many years one of my upstairs neighbors spat on the sidewalk every time we passed, for reasons too stupid to go into. But still it stings to have a random pedestrian say f*ck you to my face. I realized I have basically painted a blue target on my face.
Meanwhile the professor spends the hour deep in conversation with a buff young West Point cadet. She tells me later that he didn’t know as much as he thought he did, and that she taught him a few things in a constructive, confrontational way. Hats off to her; I wish I had this skill.
Though I played the part of enthusiastic democracy booster, I was not feeling it. The more I thought about the HONK sign, the more I realized it could be construed as provocative, even obnoxious. If you didn’t honk, did it mean you didn’t love the foundation on which this nation was created? What if the driver was just a quiet sort who didn’t want to add to the city’s cacophony?
The group I have settled in with is Rise and Resist, which describes itself as “a NONVIOLENT direct action group committed to opposing, disrupting, and defeating any government act that threatens democracy, equality, and our civil liberties.” I’d seen the leader, Jamie Bauer, who is nonbinary, around the West Village forever and now have tremendous respect for the work they do. They show up on time, stay for an hour, come prepared with loads of signs, have a calm manner and wry sense of humor, and an indefatigable band of full-time and part-time activists.
I’ve attended multiple protests with R&R at the Tesla showroom in the Gansevoort Meat Market. The first time, when all this was new, we marched right inside with our signs and our chants as we weaved around the EVs; after all, showrooms are open to the public. Some of the more devoted members of the group have gone on to get themselves arrested now and then when they feel it will have the most impact.
One day I stood with R&R at ICE headquarters on Houston Street. I’m still skittish about signs. Someone handed me a big stiff one that read DACHAU 1945, CECOT 2025 and featured a terrible photo of hordes of detainees. I wasn’t sure what CECOT stands for until I looked it up later (the Spanish version of Terrorism Confinement Center, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador.)
I know all too well what Dachau is. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t believe we were quite there, yet. Too provocative in a way that I felt might shut people down instead of opening them up.
The first time I showed up at Trump Tower, just before the Big Bill was signed, Jamie had us line up shoulder to shoulder just outside the entrance overhang. The land inside it belongs to Trump, they said. The sidewalk belongs to us. I avoided the sign that read THIS BILL WILL KILL REPUBLICATIONS and featured a bloody chainsaw, and went for the basic TAX THE RICH.
We chanted TRUMP’S BILL KILLS; KILL THE BILL and AMERICANS DON’T WANT THIS BILL. A line of cops was pressed against the sides of the entrance, one with both hands tucked into the sides of his bulletproof vest. We got high fives, nods and smiles from many passersby. Some tourists took photos. Other than the stony faces on the people in red hats, it was surprisingly, even refreshingly, hard to predict from people’s appearance which side they were on.
At the end of the hour, when the regulars were headed to their next action, Jamie gathered us and passed on a hot tip: If you go to the basement level of Trump Tower, you’ll find very nice restrooms open to the public.
I availed myself. I’d never gone in before, though the building opened in 1983 just a month after I moved to the city. I remember my mother’s flashy cousin telling me she found it elegant, and I even then I quietly cringed. Inside the mall with the 30-story-high atrium, I wanted to weep at the national farce we’re living in. Every surface, horizontal and vertical, is covered in orange marble. I recalled an expression of my father’s: class with a capital A. Every business was simultaneously generic and Trump-branded: Trump Grill, Trump Café, Trump Bar, Trump Sweets. I felt I’d stepped inside a “Simpsons” episode. Down the escalator I went, passing the windows of the Trump souvenir store, all of the garish merch on sale made in China, I’m told. The bathroom would look right at home in a multiplex.
In July I went to Tesla again. Now they lock the showroom door and call the cops when they see us coming. I grabbed a sign with a simple message: FREE HOT LUNCH, NOT TAX CUTS FOR BILLIONAIRES. Small crowd of regulars: the nice man with the rainbow sneakers, the drummer, the guy with the colander on his head. Jamie read us a scathing account from that day’s paper about Tesla’s plummeting second-quarter profits. Then they added: and that’s The Wall Street Journal. Jamie called up a young guest speaker from Act Up. The AIDS crisis is not over, he said, listing cuts to PEPFAR that have already resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths because people can no longer afford their medication.
We were another small, aging crowd. Tourists were steadily thanking us and taking our picture. The driver of an M5 bus even honked approval. It gradually occurred to me that no one could enter or exit Trump Tower. This may have been in part because of the Park Avenue NFL shooting the day before. But maybe shutting down the mall for an hour felt less objectionable than letting a band of 30 or so people exercise their free-speech rights on the public sidewalk.
I looked up at the Louis Vuitton store a block to the north, done up to look like a huge stack of their signature luggage, a sight that always thrills and appalls me. Then I noticed, atop the building next to it, an American flag on a dizzyingly high pole. The flag had wrapped itself around the pole, like a poison ivy vine in the process of choking off its host tree. Please, I prayed, let this not be a metaphor for America in 2025.
On the phone that week, I compared notes with my sister-in-law in Decatur, Georgia. We’re usually on the same wavelength, and sure enough, she was also fired up and newly active, in her local Indivisible group; I told her I had marched with Indivisible on No Kings Day. I said, I have no idea if we’re making a dent, but at least I feel I’m doing something.
She shared a statistic I hadn’t heard, based on research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts, and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
So I will keep lending my body and my voice and my energy to the movement, though probably not with a tambourine.
