I didn’t attend a protest today. Oh, it isn’t because I don’t agree with the No Kings movement. Not at all. If you know me in real life or ever read this boring blahg of blather, you know what a low opinion I have of Trump and his Sycophants of Stupidity.

I finished a memoir today by Beth Macy (Paper Girl), who grew up poor in rural Ohio (not far from JD Vance’s hometown). She clawed her way into COLLEGE and out of poverty and became a journalist. When her mom and other relatives needed help in later life (no college and still mostly poor), she began to travel back and forth to help them and ended up writing a book about the whole “project” (her word). The “project” meaning what had happened to her home town in the years she had left and how poverty (and drugs and lack of educational support and lots of other stuff) had changed her childhood community. It’s a complicated story. She is 10 years younger than I am but her eldest sibling contracted polio before the vaccine was available and has lifelong disabilities because of it. That means her sister is around my age. Yikes.

I did not get polio although I knew kids my age who survived it with disabilities. My parents (RIP) and I thank whatever gods there are who believed in scientific research enough to create a polio vaccine. And I thank those same gods that my parents believed in vaccines.

I didn’t go to a protest today. I am not really a protester. I didn’t have a sign. I loved the photos posted by my friends here on the Planet Ann Arbor and those in Sault Ste. Siberia. I live in a BLUE bubble but Sault Ste. Siberia (where our cabin is) is a RED area but there are definitely anti-fascists there. Some of the folks who protested I wasn’t surprised about. Others I was. Happily. A lot of us live in divided families. It’s hard.

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