Monday, June 16, 2025

Gratitude Monday: I love a parade

Big, big gratitude today for the millions of people in the US (and around the world) who peacefully marched in the No Kings protests on Saturday. There were gatherings in around 2000 communities across the nation, in numbers even the completely Klepto-cowed media could not ignore.

In Minnesota, following the assassination of one Democratic lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted assassination of another, protest leaders called off the planned march, but people still showed up at the state capitol in their thousands.


Estimates for the flagship march in Philadelphia put the number of marchers at 80,000.

My hometown of Pasadena put on a parade of 20,000.

LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, 60 cities in Texas, Boston, NYC, West Palm Beach—all across the country, in Red and Blue states and cities—people flooded the streets to declare their repugnance for this administration and its enablers. Even on the streets of Washington, D.C., which pointedly had not scheduled a protest (because of Kleptocrat threats), 120,000 people showed up—without incident.

(Although the evening before, Capitol Police arrested about 60 veterans who’d parked themselves on the Supreme Court steps to protest cuts to Veterans Administration services while hundreds of millions are being spent on invading US cities and a pointless parade. This action provided visuals that encapsulate the ethos of the regime: two cops handcuffing an 87-year-old vet who uses a walker for ambulation.)

Except for the trigger-happy LA cops firing "less-than-lethal" rounds at a non-NK demonstration and a couple of incidents involving people driving their cars into crowds of protesters, the events of the day were peaceful, belying the Kleptocrat’s rationale for nationalizing the militia to put down “insurrection” and “rebellion” last week. It was delicious.

Meanwhile, his long-term wet-dream of a big military parade that would put Macron’s Bastille Day effort in the shade and show his besties Kim and Putin that he’s just as strong as them (and, NGL, one of the drivers for “No Kings”), turned out to be…quite the damp squib. Putatively the celebration of the US Army’s 250th anniversary, TACOman was ecstatic that the day was also his 79th birthday, and what tinpot dictator doesn’t love a lot of military hardware and big, manly men in uniforms marching past—all for him?

The weather forecast had predicted the possibility of thunderstorms, which would have probably ended with cancellation—rain okay, but lightning is problematic for crowds. I confess I was praying for thunder, lightning, tornados, frogs, locusts and possibly even a very localized earthquake, but what we got was even better.

So much better.

Because it turns out that the big parade was pathetic in every possible way. The systems set up to manage access and egress were amateur, resulting in a huge bottleneck at one security point while another was utterly empty. Fortunately, tho, not all that many people showed up. Maybe 20,000? A far cry from the 250,000 confidently predicted. Those who actually showed up were markedly listless; I suppose it could be the delta between what they’d been led to expect and what they got. Turns out that Americans don’t get all that revved up by military hardware and marching soldiers in cammies who don’t appear to have mastered the basics of drill.


(Look—this is not representative on the US Army; we all know they deliver the goods. But honestly—they’re going to be living this fiasco down for generations, and it’s, sadly, a self-inflicted wound.)

If you think I’m exaggerating, watch this video; you can hear the tank creaking because the onlookers are silent. No cheers, no oohs. If the videographer had panned to the audience, you’d probably see them playing Candy Crush on their phones.

It was so bad that even TACO and his inner circle were dazed. I mean—look at these faces:

The contrast between the joy, energy and purpose of the No Kings rallies everywhere and this limp, ideas-above-its-station, amateur-hour narcissistic exercise is just stunning. And I’m grateful for it all.


 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

No comments: