OPINION | So the 'No Kings' Protest Happened. What Next?

Muscles on fire, feet swollen and throbbing with pain, my mother woke up Sunday morning following Saturday's "No Kings" march and rally feeling every bit of her 80 years on earth. For her, the 2-and-a-half-mile walk beginning at Cal Anderson Park and ending at the Seattle Center was worth the temporary ache. The pain didn't matter. The week had already seen the Trump administration deploy the National Guard to supposedly quell protests in Los Angeles. Here in Seattle, police used tear gas on protesters and arrested eight people at the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building during an anti-ICE rally on Wednesday. Not to mention reports that ICE activated "elite special tactical units" in five liberal cities, including Seattle.

Saturday began with news of the killing of Minnesota state Rep. ​​Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.

Somehow, all the carnage and tragedy just felt like another week in the United States we've come to know — a country where calamity is not an exception, but a routine. A nation so desensitized that the unimaginable no longer stuns. Where the first instinct at the thought of my mom joining a protest is not hope but fear at the thought of what might happen to an 80-year-old Black woman should the police decide her dignity is disposable, or ICE reach for provocation cloaked as protocol. In this version of America, violence isn't the breakdown of the system. It is the system.

In truth, I found myself, like my father and my sister, envisioning a moment during the protests when someone, emboldened by ego or gripped by rage, might ignite a match of violence. Not out of strategy, but out of disregard: for consequences, for community, for the lives they'd leave scorched. But what I carried was more than fear. It was something colder: Distrust.

And in the end, it didn't matter. Not because over 70,000 people came together in peace, purpose, and care for one another. It didn't matter because my mother had already told me she wasn't afraid. That she had prayed to El Shaddai, as she calls God, with the certainty of someone who's been in this country long enough to know its violence and still believe in its aspirations of equality.

As an agnostic, I couldn't share her faith in God. But I struggled even more with faith in people. Because what I carried that day, and most days, wasn't fear. It was the bone-deep knowledge that this country has given me every reason not to trust it.

On Saturday, my mother refused to bow to either fear or distrust. She sent me a text infused with all the stubbornness she's passed along to me: 

"I am not having any fear. I am tired of the mistreatment being done to us. I WILL be at the rally and march."

Which meant I would be, too.

Her persistence was forged from witnessing what has become this nation's familiar cruelties: the images of children ripped from their parents' arms at borders drawn by empires; the relentless branding of human beings — neighbors, coworkers, mothers — as "criminals," when their only so-called crime was daring to survive.

The children, the families, the headlines were on her mind. And alongside them were the people most of this country never sees. The ones she spends her days with as kinship caregiver coordinator, taking calls from her Skyway basement. Voice to voice, Monday through Friday, eight hours a day on the phone, she's trying to locate food, rent assistance, shelter, clean clothes, or simply a moment of peace. Grandmothers and grandfathers who didn't expect to raise children again, now parenting their grandchildren because death or addiction left them no choice.

Rarely does a call come in not laced with desperation. She lives the truth in the quote that "the measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable." And by her daily accounting, this society has failed that test coldly and consistently. Not by accident, or oversight, but by design of an intentional elevation of self-interest over solidarity. A culture that teaches us survival means stepping on the neck of the person beneath you, because if we can't all be first, then someone must be last.

It's an ideology that renders invisible the grandfather my mother spoke with last week — a man who, without warning, became the sole caretaker of four children, ages 2 through 8. He has no road map or safety net, just the crushing financial burden of diapers, meals, school supplies, and rent. His ask isn't for luxury, just enough to keep the lights on and the children fed.

Meanwhile, this same government found $45 million to throw a birthday spectacle for a president whose parade drew more flies than attendees — and rewrites the tax code to serve those who already have the most. 

In truth, that's why I was cynical about Saturday. I've seen too many marches act as catharsis but not a catalyst.

As I looked out over the crowd, the signs caught my eye — some biting, some beautiful, many both — the question lingered: What did the so-called racial reckoning of 2020 leave in its wake for Black communities? What material changes came after the chants and murals, after the corporate statements and fleeting headlines? From where I stand, all I see is backlash and a nation sleepwalking through the same cycles of trauma.

A friend said it bluntly, even while thousands poured into downtown streets: What comes next? It's the right question. The only one that matters. And it's the one I brought to every person I spoke with that day.

For Kendra Tamär Budd, a Native American photographer, the directive was clear: Those with platforms must continue using them.

For Ashley, who only wanted to be referenced by her first name, it was about defending the rights of immigrants. As she said, "Most people getting arrested aren't criminals, because criminals wouldn't be working and paying taxes. This is just about racism."

For a couple who preferred to remain anonymous, it was a call for those who can to keep showing up for vulnerable communities, especially if you're not being targeted or if you're in a unique position of privilege.

For Linda Bush — who considered staying home after the violence earlier in Minnesota but chose to show up anyway — it's about being seen.

"I heard one of the ways you can topple a fascist government is to protest," she said. "It's one of the most effective things you can do against tyranny." She added that she was glad the "No Kings" protest ruined Trump's birthday.

"If folks didn't show up out of fear, we'd be done for," she said.

For the Wonder Twinz, a DJ duo in Seattle, it's about showing up in community — and calling your members of Congress five times a day, every day. Making sure they hear you. Making sure they know this is your country, and that we must move it forward.

No, perhaps none of these suggestions were novel or groundbreaking. But they did force me to reconsider the idea that Saturday was just an ephemeral middle finger to Trump on a day when more people marched in Idaho than bothered to show up to his self-aggrandizing, taxpayer-funded parade in D.C.

It made me wonder if, in this era, protest has become our secular church.

This monstrous administration — a grotesque symptom of a nation that has never reckoned with its birthmarks of genocide, slavery, and the ruthless extraction of labor from the poor — didn't arrive by accident. It wasn't conjured out of thin air. It was constructed, brick by brick, through calculated neglect, cultivated ignorance, and a deeply rooted belief system that worships power and punishes vulnerability.

And this evil won't be dismantled through civility or wishful thinking. It will only fall if we rediscover the radical possibilities of empathy, of collective care, of a solidarity fierce enough to sustain us when systems collapse.

As with the essence of church, the work of protest is not salvation, it is revival. A space where we remember what we are fighting for, who we are fighting with, and why we cannot stop.

At a time when true gathering spaces are vanishing, where capitalism has swallowed every third place not engineered for consumption, Saturday felt like a sanctuary. A hard retort to the grind of the lie that we're in this alone.

If Saturday had a sermon, it was this: We are all we have, and for now, there is no one else we need.

So we show up to do the work. To place our bodies in the path of deportation. To refuse our elders going hungry, our children sleeping in the cold, our workers drowning in rent. Showing up, again and again, even in small, unseen ways, for those who cannot. That is the work ethic we need.

An 80-year-old woman limping through pain just to be present. Just to say, "I'm here for the ones who couldn't be."

The spirit of interdependence, alive, flickering, waiting. It lives in this country, in this city, in our communities. Sometimes buried, sometimes betrayed, but never gone.

That is the lesson no one can shield themselves from forever.

Not even a king.

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Marcus Harrison Green is the South Seattle Emerald's editor-at-large.