tibicen

The Manhattan protest march was scheduled to start at 2 PM in front of the Central Library (the one with the lions), go down 5th Avenue, and end at Madison Square. It rained all morning, forecast to taper off in the course of the afternoon, so around 1:00 I put a transparent recycling bag over my protest sign, walked to the train station, took a train to Grand Central (a conductor said "I love your sign" as I boarded), and walked a block to the library, where things appeared to be more crowded than at the last two protest marches. (I use the first-person singular because shalmestere was in Boston, winding up a week at the Early Music Festival.)

Oh, about the sign. In honor of Flag Day, one side had a US flag, followed by the words "with liberty and justice for ALL!", the last two words underlined. The other side said "1775-2025: 250 years and we still don't bow to KINGS".

Chatted with various other protesters around 42nd Street, as the crowd surged forward a foot or two, then stayed in place for ten minutes, repeat. About 3:10 I got to 41st Street, but after that things moved more smoothly, and it wasn't quite 4:00 when I got to 34th Street and peeled off for Penn Station because my lower back was hurting.

The next train to my station was in 45 minutes, but I figured I could happily spend that time sitting in a chair with a back. A couple of white twentysomethings asked to see what my signs said, and seemed quite puzzled that I opposed anything the Trump administration had been doing. We discussed the DOGE dismantling of numerous government agencies, and I suggested that if you actually wanted to reduce waste, fraud, and inefficiency in government, you would start by understanding what the agencies are supposed to do, then identifying particular programs that are working well and others that aren't achieving their goals, then analyzing them to decide whether the unsuccessful programs could be made successful or should be abandoned; you don't start by firing (illegally) all the inspectors general whose job is to reduce waste, fraud, and inefficiency in government, then firing tens of thousands of mostly-competent workers regardless of whether they're doing a good job. Doing things the right way takes months, and Musk didn't have that much time: he wanted to destroy agencies in a hurry before the courts could stop him. The guy I was talking to acknowledged that there might be more effective ways than Musk's to improve government, "but Musk is gone now. You've been talking for ten minutes, and you're clearly very passionate about what Musk did, but you haven't mentioned Trump once.' [I had, in connection with Musk having no actual governmental authority, but not much.] "So what has Trump himself done that makes you think he's a king?"

So I took a deep breath, thinking "where do I even start?", and didn't do a great job of this part, before a middle-aged black guy walked up and told the kid I was talking to that he was full of shit. The kid stood up, they started shouting in one another's faces, and almost came to blows before the black guy's female companion persuaded him to walk away. One of the twentysomethings reported the episode to a cop, then came over and shook my hand before they all went to catch their train.

At which point I looked at my phone to check on my departure time, realized that I'd been looking at the schedule of trains in the opposite direction, and that I had just missed my actual train; the next one was in another 50 minutes, so I took the subway home instead.

Meanwhile, shalmestere had just boarded a train home from Boston. I got home, took an ibuprofen, lay down for a while, applied a heating pad to my back, walked and fed the dogs, ate a little (I wasn't very hungry), then went back to Penn Station to meet her and accompany her home. After which it became a relatively normal evening.