No Kings Day protests from coast to coast on Saturday, June 14, 2025.

We spent the morning with the grandchildren. They hung around, drawing in the studio for awhile, then stayed to eat. While we ate take-out Thai, my 12-year-old granddaughter Ember asked her father why I was going to the protest at the capital. Max told her to ask me instead.

I explained that I, and a lot of other people, do not agree that President Trump is the right man for his job. I told her that many people disagree with his policies, and that we believe it’s important to gather and voice our opinion.

She took that in but it didn’t lead to an extended conversation. We ate lunch together (shout out to Thai Cuisine of Salem, best in the valley), then Max and the kids left, headed for a park, and I went to the No Kings rally at the Oregon State Capitol building.

I was moved by the crowd, the passionate chanting of resistance, the signs, the constant blaring of passing supporters teeming down Center Street leaning on their horns. Exuberance. After a few moments, I texted Max. Told him there was no danger. That morning brought the report of the killing of Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shooting and attempted murder of John Hoffman and his wife in Minnesota. I sent Max a picture of the peaceful demonstration. Told him it would be safe, if he wanted to show the kids, to take a ride up Center Street.

For a long while there was no response. I texted again, a short message. “You should!”

About an hour later I got a response. Max sounded a little reluctant in his text.

“We just got home.” Home is a town over, about a twenty minute ride.

“Well, it’s starting to wind down anyway.” I sent back, with an accompanying picture of a pick-up filled with skeletons and flags.

Then, a few minutes later, came the message, “We’re just heading over there now.”

And they did. Max brought the grandchildren to see, hear, experience this most necessary civil disobedience.

And it means so much to me that they’re aware. They are smart, creative, and talented children. Well, not children at this point; with the world they are about to inherit, they are young people, whom I love and respect.

And they are the big reason I am fighting this fight.

I cannot believe, and will not accept, that a majority of American citizens are ready to reshape the future of this county into some hellish terrorist autocracy destroying the planet for the sake of profit. They are why I am fighting.

We have to do better than this. We have to be more responsible than this. We have to leave a better world for our children, and grandchildren, and their grandchildren.