What do you call a protest that ends on time, files its paperwork in triplicate, and breaks for lunch at a Sweetgreen with a corporate diversity statement on the wall? You call it Saturday, and you call it a credit to our institutions, and you mark in your planner that civic engagement has been observed.
I was at Eliza’s on Friday night, the one before the marches, and the bipartisan lobbyist was there again, in his good cardigan, examining the underside of a serving spoon as if it owed him something. Eliza had made a thing with leeks. Everyone agreed the leeks were transcendent.
The conversation, as it does now, arrived at the question of whether one would be going. Going where, asked the actuary from across the table, and Eliza said the marches, and the actuary said which one, and that, as it turned out, was the entire problem.
There were, by my count from the kitchen, four separate marches in our city Saturday — one for Venezuela, one against the Iran posture, one for trans rights, and one, vaguely, against the administration as a general proposition. Each had its own Slack channel. Each had a designated medic. The Venezuela people, I am told, had vetted their chants with counsel.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and who has, in three decades, never been wrong about which way a city is breathing, walked the route on Connecticut and came home with a hot chocolate and a complicated mood. They were lovely, she said. They were so lovely. There were people holding signs in seven languages. The signs rhymed.
It is unfashionable to point out that the largest organized expression of civic displeasure in a generation arrived this weekend with a press kit, a parade marshal, and a designated photographer named Sasha, and that the demands, when assembled, formed a kind of Venn diagram whose central overlap was the word ‘please.’ I am unfashionable by trade.
The bipartisan lobbyist, asked if he would be going, said he had a thing. He always has a thing. The actuary said he supported the spirit. Eliza said she had RSVP’d to the morning one and would catch the afternoon one if it didn’t rain. It rained.
I am not against marching. I have marched. I was marched as a child, by a mother who marched, and her mother before her marched in shoes that did not survive the marching. What I am against is the new arrangement, in which one marches in the morning, brunches at noon, posts the photograph at three, and feels by dinner that the matter has been handled.
A friend who teaches civics — actual civics, to actual high schoolers, in a public school whose name I have been asked not to print — told me the question she got Monday was whether attending the march qualified for community service hours. She said yes. She said this with the tone of a woman who has run out of better answers.
Saturday was, by every available metric, a success. The crowds were enormous. The permits were in order. The chants were on theme. Nobody, anywhere, got hurt, and nothing, anywhere, was decided. We left the leeks recipe in the group text. We called it civic. We asked Eliza if she’d send the recipe again, since the first time, it seems, got lost.