Op Ed: While 70,000 People Marched To Seattle Center, Tukwila Protesters Needed More Bodies To Block ICE Kidnappings

If you’ve seen the news since Saturday’s ‘No Kings’ rally then you know there were a lot of people there. In nearly 20 years of living in Seattle I’ve never seen so many people gathered together and in such good spirits. It was an idyllic day for a rally and march, the June Seattle sun shone down on Cal Anderson giving the massive crowd a glow that, if not for the signs and the chants, may have made you forget what you were there for.

It was a warmer afternoon than I thought it would be since the morning had been quite brisk. I’d started the day at a Tukwila Department of Homeland Security building where members of the immigrant community had been told to gather, unexpectedly, and on a weekend morning when the building was normally closed. A group of some 100 activists, lawyers and their immigrant clients stood mulling around in the early morning chill wondering what was going on, afraid of missing an official appointment and therefore falling into that dangerously loaded category of “criminal immigrant”. 

The ‘No Kings’ protest ended peacefully, and why wouldn’t it? The Seattle Police Department closed streets for the liberal event planners, they knew they’d have little to worry about. The crowd would have fit in at any state fair or Seattle Center summer event. There were children and dogs and grandparents and vendors. 

Across town in Tukwila the day did not end peacefully. Tukwila PD violently gassed and attacked a barricade of protesters in order to allow vans and trucks to quickly escape with at least two detained members of the immigrant community who had shown up that morning for an appointment and were given no legal representation inside the building, they were simply disappeared while 70,000 people walked down Pike Street, supposedly protesting this exact type of government overreach and inhumanity. 

I spent my evening at work trying to process this juxtaposition. If 70,000 people could get out to a protest on a Saturday on Capitol Hill, why couldn’t 700 show up to a non-descript building where the most insidious and evil machinations of Trump’s police state are taking place? I’ll admit I spent much of my evening frustrated by this lack of understanding the stakes, this deeply American impulse to try and get the thing you think you’re entitled to without having done the hard work to achieve it. 

What I’m trying to say is; Donald Trump, and the disease of which he is only a symptom, will not be defeated by simply marches and rallies. Fascism will not be defeated by liberals making all of this seem as if it were just the end result of one man’s ambitions. The fascist takeover of our country will only be resisted by the people that make up our country making changes to how we engage with this threat. We must build power and resistance together through solidarity, community mutual aid, and direct action. 

If you were one of the millions of people who took part in a march this weekend, you should be proud for taking the first step toward openly displaying your disgust and awakening your inner activist. In our hyper-individualist capitalist American culture we’ve been conditioned to be obedient yet disengaged members of society, so this is not a natural state for many of us.

If you are passionate about immigrant rights, join a local organization that is focused on this. If you are passionate about labor rights, join a picket line, if it's housing that has got you most fired up, join a tenants rights union. As a member of the Seattle Democratic Socialists of America I can tell you that in an era of chaos and confusion, nothing has brought me more sanity than solidarity. If you want to engage with the work that needs to be done to reverse centuries of rot within the political systems that govern our lives, you must truly engage with those systems. I don’t know when the liberals will throw their next big march down Pike Street, but I want to encourage you to find an activist home between now and then, find your comrades, find your mission. In solidarity, forever.