My name is "NO," my sign is "NO"

Daniel Morton-Bentley leads the way.

This is Emily Writes Back, a newsletter for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.

A protestor in Savannah, Georgia, today (photo credit: my mom)

Dear Readers,

There was a slightly sluggish protest march in my town today. It had been raining all morning and the streets were still wet. Big, dark puddles at the curbs. A gray sky. But hundreds, maybe thousands of mostly 40-80 year-olds showed up. I saw at least 20 of my friends. My friend Alison said, “I thought you couldn’t come!” and I explained that our trip to Wisconsin tomorrow just meant we couldn’t travel to Washington, D.C. for the big march.

We drifted down the street en mass.

One guy in a maroon button-down patiently tried to get a good call-and-response chant going, but it proved too complicated to follow. He shouted, “What do we do when democracy is threatened?” And there was a sort of mumbly, murmured reply. (An interesting thing about protest marches is how quiet a street packed with people can actually be.)

So he helped us out: “You stand up and fight.” OK, got it. But then he didn’t start up his half of the call-and-response for another half block, and when he did, it was with a brand-new question. “What do you when they try to destroy the post office?” More unsure murmurs. “Buy stamps?” No, it had been a trick question. “Stand up and fight,” he said. Oh yeah!

I was ready the third time. He called out, “What do you do when they take away voting rights?” And even though my MIND immediately wrestled with his provocative question—because it’s tricky, isn’t it? What should we do when they do that?—my mouth knew to shout “Stand up and fight!” A few other voices joined mine and I saw the call-and-response guy give a half smile. He had the sloping posture of a modest tall person and the faraway look in his eyes of someone who has seen many a protest march but who has grown weary. Reader, he didn’t call out any further questions. He had given up.

“We could use some more black people in this march,” I thought. Or cheerleader types, coaches, elementary school teachers …

Should I be a leader and start to shout, I asked myself? What do I want to say? “FUCK YOU DUMB MAGA UN-AMERICAN ASSHOLES! GET THE FUCK OUT OF OUR GOVERNMENT AND CRAWL BACK UNDER YOUR ROCKS! HOW DARE YOU? FUUUUUCK OFF!”

That didn’t seem very inspiring. I kept quiet.

In an earlier letter to you, I pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t insult his enemies and call them names. My best friend wrote me back to say, “Remember how Martin died so young, before he could become cranky.”

That’s true. Maybe with time he would have called Bull Connor a cunt. Or Elon Musk.

Nobody liked my protest sign.

It was sweet when an gray-haired couple in matching Land’s End raincoats stopped me so they could read it all the way through. Then I flipped the sign around so they could read the other side and they laughed faintly, in relief, before melting back into the crowd.

The look on this guy’s face is representative.

But yeah, why spend time thinking up long analogies that illustrate how bad things are when you can be like my man Daniel Morton-Bentley and just say, in essence: “Um.. no. We’re not going to comply with your demands.”

Dan Morton-Bentley, of the NY State Education Department, wrote back to a Trump threat to withhold federal dollars from any state that failed to “certify” that they’d purged all DEI material from the curriculum:

We understand that the current administration seeks to censor anything it deems “diversity, equity & inclusion” (DED But there are no federal or State laws prohibiting the principles of DEL And USDOE has yet to define what practices it believes | violate Title VI; your request for certification merely adverts to “certain” and “illegal” DEI “practices.” The requested certification attempts to condition NYSED's continued funding on USDOE's interpretation of the law—an interpretation that, as USDOE admits, lacks “the force and effect of law …

We are unaware of any legal authority of USDOE to require an SEA to obtain individual certifications from each of its LEAS, report on their signature status, and propose enforcement plans to USDOE for approval in connection with a request of this nature.

Read his full letter HERE.

My friend Melanie has signed up to take a class on how to assert your constitutional rights in the face of ICE raids. My friend Lizzie, when I told her I was thinking of stockpiling bottled drinking water, said, “No, don’t hoard. You’ll be okay. You can come here. You could buy a water purifier.”

Melanie’s succinct sign

Today, millions and millions of people around this country and all over the world went out into the streets and said, “No.”

Are we going to take this nonsense sitting down? Are we going to let a small pack of C-student legacy losers who are afraid of black people and innocent immigrants and books and competition and free markets and democracy and governments of and for and by the people tear everything down?

,