Real Values

 Due to the lamentable lack of any surprising great things AND the lack of unforeseen horrible things, I did indeed attend the No Kings protest in Knoxville, TN.

Historically, East Tennesseans are notoriously publicly apathetic.  Even if we do love something or hate it, we would keep quiet about it.  Getting us to show up to protest something was hard.  Yesterday we showed up pretty good.

Felon47 is for reasons I will never understand, an incredibly polarizing figure.  (I fully and easily understand any hatred expressed towards him.  It is my inability to see anything in him worthy of support by an actual human that escapes my understanding.)  If there is one positive thing about him, accidental though it may be, it is that he is causing my communities to reflect and decide what our values really are.  While I remain dismayed by the number of my neighbors who appear to value greed, immorality, misogyny, dishonesty, and racism, I am also impressed by the number who have decided to publicly reject those things. 

 As I have gotten involved with Indivisible Knoxville, the local organizer of the protests, I had an assigned duty.  I was an observer/counter.  I walked the entire length of the protest with a clicker counter and attempted to get a rough count of attendees.  The snapshots and videos will have to tell the story as the crowd was quite fluid.  Folks crossed the streets and in that manner could have been counted twice or not counted at all.  I did not observe any untoward events.  No LEOs were attacked - physically or verbally.  I observed one well-behaved counter protester who was treated with respect or ignored. 

I started my counting at the official start time of the protest and was done with an hour still to go.  I attempted to count the cars honking their horns or otherwise indicating their support of the protest.  I counted the south side of the protest first and by the time I had gotten through about half of the north side, the south side appeared to have approximately doubled in number.  Again, a rough count was the best I could do.  I got about 2800 with my clicker and I estimated the final number to be better than double that.  5k - 8k is my guesstimate.

BONUS:  As an apparent accident of scheduling, the Washington D.C. Gay Men's Chorus was in town and performed a few songs enjoyed by those close enough to hear them. Click on this link for a sample.