It was encouraging to see how many of us came out this weekend for the No Kings march, and we all should be very grateful to the organizers of the event who surely put in many long hours of work setting that up. But I came away a little concerned that we are dissipating our energies and introducing potentially divisive issues unnecessarily. The speakers seemed to represent a grab-bag of causes, some of which are only tangentially related to the day’s theme.
One speaker, for instance, spoke fervently in favor of rent control in Santa Barbara. I personally support rent control, but not all of my fellow citizens do. Do we want them to feel unwelcome at such rallies?
We face the greatest threat to our democracy and our constitutional order since World War II — a truly existential threat to the nation. We desperately need as many of our fellow citizens as possible to join with us in defending the norms and orders of our Constitution and resisting the entrenchment of racist, oligarchical authoritarianism.
To that end, I’d hope everyone would feel welcome every Saturday at 10 a.m. at Hitchcock and State to talk about that and to celebrate the great and unrealized promise of this country.
