I Can’t Keep Quiet, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

January 27, 2017 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments

Baby boomers can be really obnoxious. I mention this because I’m a baby boomer, and I’m probably about to be more than a little bit obnoxious.

Boomers have been through an America in which our elected representatives seemed to ignore the will of the people and the founding principles of our country, including but not limited to equal rights for all (especially but not limited to voting rights) and an end to a war that drafted our young men (especially our working class young men and young men of color) to die in a war that was never even officially declared.

We boomers were a huge demographic group, and I doubt that those of us protesting were ever a majority. That wasn’t the point. Terrible things were happening and we had to do something about it. Some of us took to the streets to make our opinions known. Eventually, we forced changes.

Today, we have a man in the White House who received nearly three million fewer votes than his opponent, a fact he seems determined to ignore. We have to do it again.

Last weekend, I was thrilled to participate in the New York version of the Women’s March. According to Fortune magazine (hardly a bastion of liberalism), I was joined by more than four million of my fellow Americans. Some of us marched in big coastal cities, but lots of us marched in small towns in every state of the Union.

When so many women get together with shared values, there is beauty.

Was the Women’s March a perfect event? Hell, no. It was sloppy and sometimes rude. Some people were hurtful to other marchers. Some people felt deliberately excluded.

These are not good reasons to stop protesting. They are, instead, reasons to protest better. And more often. We need to keep doing this until we get it right.

Taking my own advice, I was thrilled to participate in a smaller demonstration on Wednesday night, organized by CAIR to protest Trump’s anti-immigration actions. Like the Women’s March, there were simultaneous events in other cities, It was the first demonstration I’ve ever attended that started late because we were waiting for some to finish evening prayers.

This meant that the several thousand people in the park standing on their feet (instead of kneeling on mats) were not observant Muslims, but rather people who came out to support our neighbors who are observant Muslims (and other immigrants and refugees).

One thing that’s different for this particular Boomer is my tolerance for rhetoric. I don’t like to stand around and listen to speeches. My back starts to hurt. If you can’t be so entertaining that I don’t notice my back, please don’t speak.

And I don’t like to chant, unless the chant has a particularly infectious rhythm to it. “This is what America looks like” is a fun cheer. “2-4-6-8/Organize and smash the state!” is a fun cheer. “No ban, No wall, New Yorkers for all” is not a fun cheer.

It’s got to have a beat. It has to make us want to dance.

So when I say baby boomers are obnoxious, consider it a heads-up. We’ve been through this before, and we know how things like this play out, at least some of the time. Get used to it.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, can’t believe she still has to protest this shit.