Which side are you on

I get anxious before a protest. In part because of the ever present potential for things to go sideways via police-instigated violence. That’s not the anxiety I mean in this case. We drove into Cambridge and got on the train at Alewife the last stop on the Red Line heading inbound and I felt depressed about having to do that. Having to commute to a protest. But the thing I'm talking about is that I was worried no one else was going to come. Like it was a party I was hosting or a show I was playing. I had nothing to do with Saturday’s planning to be clear. Besides the ways we are all part of every protest either actively or in absentia. 

I didn’t have to worry about anyone coming for very long though. The T was packed. More than usual I mean. It was slow walking up the Park Street stairs. They said around 30,000 people showed up between speeches on the Boston Common and a march to City Hall Plaza for the main event. Some reported 100,000. I don’t know about that number but you could believe it for a minute standing there in the massive crowd. One of the weird things about being in a protest march is that you usually have no concept of how big it is while it is happening. You have to find out about that later. In the meantime you can only see the bodies around you. 

That is one of the best and most important aspects of attending a protest. Seeing and feeling the bodies around you. Feeling part of something larger than yourself.

No one on my feeds the past 48 hours will shut the fuck up about the right way to protest. The group behind the protests this weekend around the country that millions of people came out for may or may not be the same old Democrat bullshit. I do not know and I don’t really give a shit right now. I will tell you what is true and that is that tens of thousands of us marched and chanted and listened for hours as speakers from all manner of political groups I am excited about and ones I am skeptical of came together for one thing we can agree upon which is that this country – this evil fucking country that we all despise and yet must continue to live in for better or worse – is being dismantled and sold off for parts for the benefit of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and their rich friends. If you object to this ravaging then you and I have a place to begin negotiating from.

M. and I stood in the cold 40 degree rain and cheered and booed. Everyone fucking hates Elon Musk this much is clear. People hate this guy's fucking guts. That is raw material to work with. A person like him should not exist. No billionaire should. It's not that many steps from one idea to the other. You can guide a person there no matter their politics.

I don’t think I saw more than one or two cops which was kind of unsettling in the moment and also now in retrospect. Some people have said it was because this march was largely white people but I don’t know how they would have known to count on that.

Ah shit I just remembered the surveillance state but you know what I mean. 

I don't know about elsewhere but it was mostly younger people of color on stage for us in Boston despite the crowd being mostly older white people or else younger parents with their sign-waving kids. God there were so many corny signs. Ed Markey and Ayanna Pressley and Michelle Wu all spoke and were mostly fine. Occasionally inspiring. There was also a lot of talk about protecting immigrants and labor and students – Rümeysa Öztürk in particular – and trans people and native people and yes even a bunch of mentions of Gaza from the stage and a lot from the crowd. Hands off Gaza was chanted at this rally. I almost teared up a couple times man. 

Free Rumeysa Ozturk

A Tufts University student named Rumeysa Ozturk was disappeared off the streets of Somerville, MA yesterday for the crime of co-writing an extremely tame op-ed last year asking her school to divest from Israel’s war machine. Yes all of her “papers were in order” to be here studying. No she

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

I'm sorry but for all their faults I still love Boston and Massachusetts so much. America on the other hand I don't know about but still.

I told M. I was libbing out a little bit. Everyone’s a little bit of a lib at a protest like this we joked and then we looked over at the people near us waving Palestinian flags and banging a drum and screaming like hell at Markey and Pressley and thought hmm maybe not everyone. Good I thought. Get their asses.

Something that feels productive good and true

We lost the great Val Kilmer this week and so naturally I have been thinking back to my favorite role of his as Doc Holliday in Tombstone. “A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

I’ve published a few pieces recently (like this one from the other day) about the buoying effect of simply getting out there. Getting off your ass. Off the computer.  And I had forgotten for a while but it is indeed true. It is different. My back didn’t even hurt standing there the whole time. What a miracle. I was being held up. 

I bumped into Ken out of the Dropkicks and took a selfie like a dork. He acted like he remembered me and that was nice of him. His band played Which Side Are You On at the end of the day as the rain really started to fall and that was the only thing I thought about on the way home and for the rest of the weekend. It's an old question and one labor movements are intimately familiar with but I hope all the other people who were there and maybe never really asked it of themselves are doing so now. I hope the people at home who didn’t come out this time might start to feel the weight of that question tugging at their consciences. 

Ok great that all sounds like a nice little day so now what? That's a good question but I didn’t see the need to ask it in the middle of one concrete example of what out of many. While a possible first step was happening. Protesting isn’t the only thing but it is one of the things.

Now what? is the same problem we had a couple of days and weeks and months ago. But I bet a lot of people this weekend found neighbors they can try to figure it out with together.

Listen to me I still hate these donation-seekers who tell us a better future is only possible by chipping in $10 to their organizations. But if this isn’t an example of millions of people around the country ripe to be organized and ushered into a new understanding that a better world than this is possible then I don’t know what is. All protests are different in their own way but at the heart of them they are all usually pretty simple: It doesn't have to be this way. I refuse to let it be this way. We refuse to let it be this way.

I liked this photo M. took as we tried to get home.

People seemed to appreciate this big discount on a subscription I posted the other day so here you go again. I'll leave it up for another day or two.

Carmen Aiken wrote in with some impressions from the protest in Chicago:

Three protestors on the 62 bus, a sign, someone carrying a drum. The abrupt stop of buses down Dearborn and the hustle up the street. Lady Liberty riding a scooter Northbound in the protected bike lane. The magnetic collection of bodies in front of the Thompson Center, more and more to fill Clark between Washington and Randolph. Many more middle-aged and elder white cis women than I have maybe ever seen at a protest. Puffer coats and the stubborn presence of pink pussy hats. An 80 year old standing in the waiting crush in front of me, a foot shorter, waving a red hand clapper in the chants. My body trying to give her space and block the young person wrapped in a keffiyeh who keeps pushing their backpack into me, but at least not into her head. Signs. Many, many signs. Clever slogans sidewalk to sidewalk above all our hands. My instinct to be wary of this, the transmission of the need to be internet pithy into the world. My other instinct to stop being like that, and at least think people are THINKING. People are making. Many women taking selfies, any women taking photos of signs. Talk of Metra trains inbound, full of people. He’s a Nazi, he’s always been a Nazi, his grandmother was a Nazi, his grandfather was KKK. Lots of signs playing on DOGE, on Hitler, on impotence, on orange. Memes in the air. Speeches no one can hear. Are we moving? We are waiting. You will know when we are moving. Strollers, a corgi dog, people along the side of the route screaming and taking photos and cheering. So many people taking photos. So many videos. So much for safety protocols. What’s that scary black vehicle? Tourists and young men in business suits staring. A man in a Canada jersey pitching elbows up, murmuring Elbows up, Elbows up. The voices of older woman screaming their answer to my, STAND UP! HANDS OFF! FIGHT BACK FIGHT BACK! Viva viva Palestina. Hands off our bodies. Hands off Abortion. SEIU pouring from their school buses. Nurses against Fascism. Grandmothers against Fascism. Marines against Fascism. Stop killing Veterans. Free Mahmoud. Free Rumeysa. Blue and yellow Ukrainian flag draped groups. Blue and pink and white trans pride flag draped groups. Marchers in wheelchairs, with canes, with walkers. A child banging on a bucket drum. Teenagers banging on bucket drums. Teenagers. Toddlers. Mennonites in knit cap. Hands off science, hands off healthcare, hands off teachers, hands off Medicare, hands off Social Security. DSA Group Photos, the CTU, men in safety vests from the Chicago Federation of Labor. How big do you think it is? Bored and not many cops on the corners on their bikes. The almost too on the nose screaming towards the empty Board of Trade. Edmar singing There Is A Light That Never Goes Out into his karaoke machine, but the lyrics changed to the death of fascists. The spread onto State Street. Old chants from the past that don’t catch on. What’s he saying? Banks got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out. Oh, that’s true. My 75 year old father next to me, just off on the chant beat by a moment, hey hey, ho ho. We used to fight about all of it, he used to have a photo of himself with Bush Sr. White women screaming FUCK TRUMP at the end of the march. The march that continues down 18 city blocks as I walk back towards the train. The train cars taking on people and their signs. A feeling I know is not hope, but maybe some shaky hands in the dark of where we are being cornered, from people I don’t know and would not have known, but here we are anyway. Not a single perfect one of us. Any small step that could mean mercy, resistance, any insistence to stay alive, or cry out as the dark keeps descending.

They previously wrote for Hell World about the DNC over the summer.

What does saving democracy even mean?

Destruction and creation at once

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Rest in peace to Al Barile of Boston hardcore legends SSD.

The kids will have their say
The kids will rise today
Our union can't be broken as they will try
We'll be united till each of us die

Here's a fun memory from six years ago.

I'm sure you all read the piece in question by now but those of you who haven't here you go. Still relevant sadly.

I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family

Progress is made one funeral at a time

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Paid subscribers can stick around for some recommended reading, new music of the week, and some other bullshit. Thanks for being here everyone. See you out there?