Kumbaya, Rational People

I defy you to disagree.

April 23, 2017

Today I am not alone in carrying a sign around town.

I’m still the only one in my subway car with a sign, though, and I’m disappointed, until we hit 34th Street, and then everybody shows up. I had been looking at this woman’s pants, stretch herringbone with a thin piping, wanting to ask her where she got them, when she turns to me and asks, “Is there a protest today?”

I tell her about the March for Science, and what we’re protesting. She nods and says, Yes, the truth is important. She’s originally from the Ukraine but lives here now. In Ukraine, is very bad, she says. Even though I live here, I can’t forget what happens at home.

I know, I agree. We think about leaving the US, but we would worry for the people we left behind. As a Jew, it worries me, the way they are treating Muslims in this country. It makes me scared.

Yes, she says doubtfully, but, with Muslims, you don’t always know, who is what…

SAD TROMBONE

Conversation over. Great job, being an immigrant who fled political oppression, and managing to be prejudiced against immigrants fleeing genocide. FOH with your ignorant pants. I’m going to follow that large group of people getting off at Columbus Circle and flooding up Broadway.

Guys guys guys. So many people with signs. But like SO many. And the BEST signs. And kids in strollers with signs, and dogs in lab coats, and thousands and thousands of smart, enthusiastic, happy, peaceful people coming together to point at each other and say, “I love your sign!”

This was the back of the sign. I always make two-sided signs with different slogans because I am longwinded, as exemplified in this caption.

I keep starting Facebook Live to try and show the size and breadth of the crowd, and then getting choked up and inarticulate, and Stana said she couldn’t hear me which is probably because I was more like, hork hork hork, like a cat expelling a hairball, than like speaking.

Around 12:30, it rains on everybody’s signs, and many signs become hats. My own sign curls and softens on the way back to the subway. I didn’t want to leave so soon, but I had made another commitment, and that was dumb, because it was a *whole huge party of people with signs and slogans and ideas,* and it was pretty agonizing to tear myself away.

Also, it makes me the lone sign-carrier on the train downtown, so I get to be the ombudsman again, this time with a dad and his two kids, a girl est. age 12, and a boy est. age 10. What is the march about? Dad asks, in a tone I take as patronizing, in an accent I think is French.

Denial of truth and science, I tell him. Cutting the EPA and the FDA and the Dept. of Ed, teaching creationism, denying climate change. Alternative facts. AG Jeff Sessions devaluing forensic evidence in courts.

The dad is squinting at me skeptically, but his daughter is 1000 percent on board. She says, There is SO MUCH climate change, it’s crazy. We talk about it at school.

Good school. The dad mentions they’re from New York. So maybe he’s originally French and his kids are native New Yorkers? It doesn’t matter. Dad isn’t fully sold.

But DNA, he says, they can’t get away from using DNA in court. I am guessing he has not heard about the hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits.

It’s raining from the subway to my house and my sign is fairly abstruse: RATIONAL PEOPLE AGAINST UNTENABLE ARGUMENTS . Nobody’s going to stop to talk to me and my mushy sign. So I just sing quietly as I walk, to myself: Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

(To read Kumbaya, Motherfucker in chronological order, click here.)