Tracy and I went to the third No Kings Rally and March on Saturday. For the first time ever, the park where we usually meet for these rallies was full, from one end to the other. For the first time, I ran into people I knew, despite the crowd being the largest ever. The weather was nice, and the trees were in bloom everywhere.
Event: Third No Kings Rally & March
Date: March 28, 2026
Location: Cal Anderson Park to the Seattle Center
Crowd size: 75,000 to 100,000 people
Seattle Times coverage: At third No Kings rally in Seattle, tens of thousands decry Trump
I wish I could say that I felt inspired, but I didn’t. Despite so many people protesting and carrying signs and chanting, nothing meaningful will happen in our country for many months—and that’s if we’re fortunate to have free and fair elections in November. Because the president wants to stop people like us from voting. My state of Washington votes by mail, and he just signed an executive order to…I don’t even know what he thinks he can do to our constitutional right, but he’s trying.
Meanwhile, people are being hurt and dying across the planet because of the result of our elections, here in the US. The artificial barrier to bringing relief to so many people felt so absurd to me that day. I keep reading news articles about the victims of the war in Iran and about people who can’t have heating oil or farmers who don’t have fertilizer—and other surprising effects of the Strait of Hormuz being closed. And my logical brain just revolts at the thought that no one can stop this disaster of choice. All our billions of brains put together cannot stop one deranged brain from bringing death and destruction. It seems like such a failure for humankind.
That doesn’t mean I won’t show up at these rallies—always with my US passport in my pocket. I’ll keep showing up and marching because our opportunistic politicians need to see that this regime is loathed inside the country, so they can make their best bets for the mid-term elections. But to contemplate an entire planet at the whim of one flawed man and his sycophants, while millions of us are raising our voices in the void was quite depressing. But every day is one day closer to the mid-term elections, our first chance to right this egregious wrong. I guess I won’t be enjoying summer as much as I usually do, being in a hurry to get to November.
