The most notable protester at last weekend’s No Kings rally in Beaver, Pa., wore an inflatable sumo wrestler costume with an orange t-shirt underneath to make the skin look orange and a crown on his head. He seems to have been one of the organizers. It was one of only two of the old-fashioned theatrical — by old-fashioned I mean 1960s — touches in what was a straightforward rally on the lawn of the Beaver County Courthouse. The other was a few women in Handmaid’s Tale costumes.

The treatment of illegal immigrants (most people used the term “illegal”) was the issue most of those I talked to mentioned, along with a usually very general concern for the Constitution and democracy. A few people mentioned LGBTQ and abortion rights. Economics, to my surprise, wasn’t a big issue, unless tied to Trump himself. A sign saying “Deport criminal billionaires” was one of the few economic signs I saw and only a few people mentioned economics when I spoke to them.

Not everyone, disappointingly, could articulate a reason for being there. They thought the country would be better off without President Donald Trump and spent two or three hours on a Saturday afternoon saying so.

As an example of popular engagement in our political life, it was cheering, especially with most people being so normal. But I wonder how practically effective such efforts will be — even when millions gather across the nation — in affecting someone so insouciant about the processes of democracy as Trump. A president can ignore a lot of protest.

Cheers, chants, signs, flags

The rally in Beaver, a small city on the north side of the Ohio River as it bends west, and the county seat of Beaver County, attracted I’m guessing 300-some people. Among the speakers were local members of Congress Chris DeLuzio and Aliquippa mayor Dwan Walker.

Most people lined up along the streets, holding their signs, chanting and cheering and waving when people drove by making supportive honks. About one in four or five did.

At one point a few bikers flying Trump flags from their bikes went up and down the street in front of the protest, gunning their engines to make a noise no one could talk over, but they left in a few minutes. I could see three policemen standing by a cruiser about 100 feet from the speakers, and later saw a couple more parked on a side street. I’m told one guy pulled up to the curb and started arguing with people until a policeman told him to move along.

About one in five or six people carried signs, about half of those hand-written. Most of the printed signs carried slogans like “No Kings.” A few people carried flags, like one with an arm in armor holding a sword and the banner “Obedience to tyrants is disobedience to God,” once seen along with the Gadsden (“Don’t tread on me”) flag among MAGA people. They have recently lost some of their fear of tyranny.

Among the handwritten signs and t-shirts: “Golf should not be played with bone spurs”; “I am not radical. I’m just paying attention”; “No faux king way”; “More Jesus, less judging”; and “No Taco” with the words arranged vertically, with the letters standing for “Tyrants, Autocrats, Caesars, Overlords.” I only saw one too rude to quote.

High schoolers and vets

High school juniors, Hayden and Trace were, with some middle school girls, the youngest people I saw in a crowd whose average age I’d guess to be 50 or so. Hayden carried a two-sided sign, with “If there is no justice for the people, there should be no peace for the government” on one side and “Vote for a rapist. Get (expletive adverb)” on the other. Trace carried one reading “Fight for those victims who can’t.”

Hayden came because she’d been arguing about politics in a current issues class, with some vocal Trumpians. (Her liberal peers stayed quiet.) They both cared about immigrants. “People are being deported without due process,” she said. “People are very pro-life until it’s an immigrant. Families are being ripped apart. Kids get pulled out of care” to be deported.

They support abortion and gay rights, which they think the Trump administration threatens. “It’s not for the state to decide on something between a woman and her doctor,” Hayden said. Trace added, “Everyone should have the right to do what they want.”

As I was talking to Roger, a 32 year Army veteran who served in Vietnam and in Afghanistan, another vet came up, lamenting the vets who support Trump. “He called us names!” he said, shaking his head. “He insulted us. He even said John McCain wasn’t a hero.”

That is something I’d wondered about since 2016. “I don’t understand it either,” said Roger.

Like everyone else there, he did not admire Donald Trump. “The country is so divided by what Trump is doing,” he said. “He’s not looking out for the country, he’s not doing anything for this country. Everything he does, he does for himself.” He also noted Trump “doesn’t care about the people working under him. He’s going to throw them under the bus.”

He pointed, alone of the people I talked to, to the effects of Trump’s dismantling of the federal government. “It hasn’t all hit yet. But all the changes, all the people they’re getting rid of, it’s going to hit all of us down the line.” He added, “Look who’s in charge of our health.”

He came to protest “creeping authoritarianism,” said Scott, a package handler and school bus driver. In a very Pittsburgh way, he’d walked over to admire my Red Sox cap and after talking for a couple minutes, we realized we’d met a couple months ago at a going away party for my eldest daughter at Fermata in Ambridge, to which he’d been invited even though he didn’t know her.

Pointing to the threats to due process and habeas corpus, he said, “If this can happen to illegal immigrants, it can happen to any of us.” As a Christian, this is a “faith time.” The New Testament teaches “You’ve got to stand up and be counted. And you have to risk something.”

Activists, union leaders and nuns

I asked Tina why she was carrying a 3x5 American flag on a six-foot pole. “Because it’s flag day,” she said. (“Oh. Right,” I said.) An older woman who described herself as an activist, she came out to fight for democracy. “Our Constitution is under attack,” she said, mentioning the right to protest and due process for immigrants. She invoked the political thinker Noam Chomsky, a name I did not expect to hear, but heard again from someone else.

Jan named her Italian Greyhound Lincoln, sitting regally on her lap as we talked, after the president, “who would be a progressive today” and would be saddened by what his Republican party stood for now. A vice-president of the Beaver-Lawrence Labor Council, her major issue is health care. “There should be universal single payer health care.” A second is immigration. “He deports children!” she said, as if that said everything. She did not like Donald Trump. “He’s a racist, sexist felon.”

“You should talk to the nuns,” she said as we finished, pointing me to two women standing by the street, holding a hand-lettered sign saying “LOVE one another No exceptions. — Jesus.” Sisters of St. Joseph from the mother house down Rt. 65 in Baden, they worked at Casa San Jose, which a sister of their order founded.

“So many things are going on, it’s a fire hose of distress,” said Sr. Mary. “This is causing distress for our immigrant neighbor, for people who are facing the loss of Medicaid.” One of the people who thought about economics, she said, “I have a really hard time supporting tax cuts to billionaires and cutting aid to people who need it,” adding “I’m a believer in a shared humanity. I always support the underdog.”

She rejected not only ICE’s raids but the way they conducted them. People working in restaurants were being arrested in ICE raids at 5:00 a.m., or at the laundromat doing their clothes early, she said. Americans “are supposed to be peaceful people, not people who create fear.”

“How do we respond? We pray. We have to understand other people.” Even, it turns out, the people who are creating the distress she opposes. Asked what she would do to deal with them, she said, “It sounds corny, but is really true: I would really want to listen to them. I would want to know what they see, what they’re okay with. I wouldn’t say this in a smart-alecky way, but I’d say ‘How can you be ok with this?’”

He respected the election, that Trump is the president, Curtis said. A local musician, in his late twenties, he said, “Some things are crazy, the amount of division,” including actions “that go against the Constitution, that divide people.” He mentioned Trump’s wanting to run for a third term. “We want a leader for all people.”

Immigration was an issue for him. “Just because some people come here illegally, they should be randomly selected and thrown out.” So were racism and LGBTQ rights. “I don’t identify as anything myself, but I think people ought to be able to live as themselves.”

Serving our country

When Roger was in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970, he and the other soldiers didn’t understand the protesters back home. “They weren’t backing us up, me and my troops,” he said, and he felt betrayed.

He didn’t understand why they protested till he got home and started reading. “I didn’t understand how much it (the war) was not for us. The North Vietnamese were normal people. They were fighting for their nation.”

He finds himself in the same situation now. “But I was over there to serve. I served my country. And I’m serving my country now.”

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