BY EMMA ABATA
Los Alamos

My recent letter to the editor, “We Are Not Fighting a King. We Are Fighting an Empire,” clearly ruffled some liberal feathers. Good. That was the point.

The most common response I received, across both the Daily Post and the Reporter comment sections in social media, was some version of this: “Sounds like you are just standing on a street corner holding signs every Saturday  pointing your finger at other people standing on the corner holding signs. How is what you are doing any different?”

That question was asked more than once, on more than one thread, by more than one person. So let me answer it clearly, one more time, for everyone.

We are not just holding signs. We never were.

My mother and I have shown up every single Saturday for well over 120 weeks straight. In rain. In snow. In wind. Getting threatened and spit on by Nazis. Not three times because the president happens to be on the other team. Every single week, for over two years, regardless of who is in office and regardless of which party is committing the violence.

Those Saturdays are not political theater. They are not even protests in the way most people think of that word. What we do every week is closer to an encampment. We return to the same public space, every single week, because we refuse to let this community forget its complicity in a holocaust that is happening right now, in present day, in front of our faces. A holocaust that is not just happening to people far away. It is being committed by the very politicians we elected, on both sides, and funded with our money. Money that our labor produced. Money that our blood, sweat, and tears produced. Our tax dollars are going to bomb children instead of to feed children, to educate children, to house children. That is what we refuse to be silent about. That is why we keep showing up.

We meet in public because we are trying to build something in a town that has largely ignored and censored us. We meet with each other. We meet with anyone willing to stop and actually talk. The signs exist for two reasons: to break through the severe censorship from mainstream media and local silence, and to let people know what we are organizing around, because nobody else in this town is going to do that for us.

And we do a lot more than hold signs. Saturdays are our meetings to organize. Over the past two years, we have hosted multiple free film screenings and expert speaker events. We have raised donations. We have connected unhoused people at our protests with housing and mental health services. We have helped disabled community members. We have covered rent for single mothers. That is what showing up every week with two to five people actually builds over time.

Now imagine if we had even 50 people from the No Kings rallies show up who actually wanted to fight this at the root cause. Which is not Trump.

The part nobody wants to hear

Everything happening right now, the deportations, the cruelty, the military posturing, the attacks on free speech, Democrats alongside Republicans paved the road for all of it.

Biden put kids in cages and increased ICE’s budget. Kamala ran on being tougher on the border than Trump and promised the most lethal military force in the world. Obama deported more people than any president and dramatically expanded the drone program. Democrats had decades to codify Roe v. Wade and didn’t. They had every opportunity to protect trans lives, fight climate change, and invest in working people. Instead, they sent billions in bombs overseas while your grocery bill, your rent, your gas prices, your healthcare, and your kid’s underfunded classroom all got worse.

Democrats and Republicans do not oppose each other. They work together for the billionaire class, for the Epstein class, not for the people. They always have.

This is not a fringe opinion. This is the lived experience of every Black and Indigenous community in this country that has watched both parties participate in their dispossession for centuries. The genocide this country was built on never ended. It just kept finding new targets. And when the targets were Black and brown people, most of us didn’t want to deal with it. When our own party and our own politicians that we voted for were doing it, we didn’t want to deal with it. We just wanted to be at brunch.

Now it’s spreading. The genocide in Palestine never stopped. In fact, look at it now. It keeps expanding abroad and at home. For white Americans, this feels new and terrifying. For Black and Indigenous communities, it has always been here.

The real political theater

You want to know what political theater actually looks like? Hundreds of people showing up to a corporate-sponsored rally, holding a sign for a couple of hours, feeling good about it, and going home. Rallies sponsored by the very billionaires and the very corporate party apparatus that are part of the violent two-party colonial system we have always had in this country.

We have tried to show up to these No Kings protests to connect, to meet people, to find others who want to go deeper. And we are largely glared at. We are told our Palestinian flags will “derail” things. Isn’t that the whole point? The whole point is to make people uncomfortable. People are way too comfortable with the genocides, both historical and present day, at home and abroad. People are not angry enough that their tax dollars bomb children instead of feeding them, educating them, housing them. People are not angry enough that we live in a country that has been led for decades and centuries by presidents who are pedophiles, slave owners, war criminals, and they all are 
bought and paid for by the billionaire class.

If your outrage only activates when the face of empire changes parties, then what you oppose is not oppression. It is the version of oppression you were told to notice.

The invitation still stands

I am not writing this to win an argument in a comment section. I am writing this because the moment we are in demands honesty, not comfort. And I know that there truly are people showing up to these corporate rallies who want to genuinely do something to impact real change.

For those of you with a genuine conscience, who actually want to be part of dismantling the root cause of the systems that are destroying the planet and destroying people at home and abroad: come meet with us. Every Saturday at 11 a.m. at Ashley Pond. We are organizing. We are building. And the more people we have, the more we can actually get done.

Stop punching left while sliding right. Stop dismissing the people who have been out here every single week for over two years while you showed up three times. Come talk to us. Come organize with us. Come build something real.

Because the genocides are spreading. And they will not stop because we voted for the other team.