Tomorrow, Saturday, October 18, you might have heard, is this year’s culminating “No Kings” protest demo all over the land. We’ve been to a couple of these curious spectacles since springtime here in the Hudson River Valley, in the next town over. The crowd there was just about entirely made up of aging Boomers, joyfully re-living the halcyon days of the Vietnam protests. It was kind of like a street production of the old Broadway hit Hair, only with a cast of 75-year-olds. Let the sun shine in! But this rural, small-town corner of America is overwhelmingly geriatric. There is next to nothing for young people to do around here, so they flee at the earliest opportunity. The catch is: turns out that opportunity is rather scarce elsewhere, too.

For sure, many of these hippie elders have children, even grandchildren now, who are exactly those who are not thriving in the places they have fled to. Deep down, they don’t really know who to blame. Something has gone wrong in this country. But their placards said “Resist.” Resist what? We asked. Trump, of course. Trump, Trump, Trump, we go a’marchin’. He’s Stealing our democracy! Meaning: Trump is the one responsible for our country’s decades-long descent into economic failure, political animus, and social degeneracy. You had to wonder who is paying them to yell an empty slogan that Nancy Pelosi has repeated a million times. We are going to find out.

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