Protesting is my Special Interest

Really, it is!

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. And speaking of high control environments, I hope people are paying attention to the sheer amount of military force being utilized by Trump to quell protests (supposedly a protected right in America). I have been following David Farrier as he is writing about checking out the protests but I also want to encourage people to check out their local 50501 organization and see if there is a local No King’s Day protest you can join in on Saturday. This is an all-hands on deck moment for those who can get out there (but I will have suggestions for other ways to help at the end of today’s piece).

Tomorrow night at 6PM PT I will be hosting a witchy anti-fascist creativity zoom! I will have a few questions centered around creativity, host a time for pulling cards or journaling/doing art, and then we will have some small group discussions and set intentions around creative resistance for the next moon cycle. If you want to be a part of that, you need to be a paid subscriber (only $5 a month) and you will be emailed a link to the zoom tomorrow.

Hello everyone,

Well it’s turning out to be long, hot antifascist summer like I knew it would. Since January 20th I have been braced for what I felt was inevitable — protests and clashes and governors getting into fights with Trump, military personal being deployed while states try and figure out how the eff to respond. As always, the people who have been at the frontlines for decades — warning us about ICE, about our rapidly militarizing police, about Peter Thiel’s company Palantir selling surveillance technology to authoritarian governments to try and intimidate people into not protesting or resisting — are still at the frontlines and are waiting for everyone to catch up.

Ever since we lived in Minneapolis from 2012-2015 my partner Krispin and I have been involved in local protests. We viewed it as a part of being an evangelical Christian, frankly, because we were taught to be vocal about our values and ethics in the public square! What we didn’t exactly expect was how deeply entrenched the anti-protest sentiment was in people who ostensibly were all about America’s “freedoms”.

In the past few years, I have done some deep dives on how the protests in the 1960s scared the shit out of white male conservatives and how they inspired folks like Dr. Dobson to write his best-selling book(s) on child discipline. He himself drew the line directly between a population that has been well-disciplined (beaten in childhood in order to gain immediate compliance to authority) and a population that will not protest god-ordained authority in the streets. Someday I will write about J. Edgar Hoover who wrote tons of editorials for Christianity Today, and how many of them were used to smear anti-war and pro-civil rights protesters as communist and un-American (thanks to the incredible book The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover by Lerone A. Martin for alerting me to this history). Last year I took a lot of my research and published an entire chapter about protests sparking the Religious Authoritarian movement. It has, unfortunately, been back on my mind as of late.

On January 19th I deleted my Meta accounts because I was feeling scared and overwhelmed and like no one was understanding the severity of what was coming. I was tired of feeling so much dread about the clashes that were coming, while also being in the throes of a project aimed at helping survivors of the authoritarian methods I knew were coming for us all. But now that everything is out in the open — deploying the military against the American people simply for trying to defend their neighbors from terrorists kidnapping children and arresting/deporting people without due process — I honestly feel like a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. This is what happens to me when I can feel a shift in the collective. When more and more people get radicalized and start to actually live in our reality (and not the one they wished we lived in) it helps me. I know I am not alone, and never will be. My values of justice and autonomy are deep and strong, and I won’t go quietly into living under authoritarianism. And this is true for SO many Americans!

And guess what? It turns out it is really hard to delete your Meta accounts! So now I am back to being on them right when things are heating up because it is still a place where information can be disseminated while the mainstream media veers ever more into state-run propaganda. But it also reminded me that I have always used Instagram to document my love of protest signs. So here, without further ado, are my favorite protest signs I have made over the past 9 years. (If all of this information seems like a repeat of a post from last year, it’s because some of it is! I guess the LA protests have got me in my feels and I needed a chance to process/write about some of this again).

Let’s start off with an oldie (but a goodie). Here’s one I made to go protest against Trump’s travel bans in January of 2017. Look at my proud little smirk!

I obviously still identified as an evangelical and was at the phase in my deconstruction where I was trying to utilize the term and even own it in order to cause cognitive dissonance for evangelicals. At this protest at the PDX airport the Proud Boys showed up and screamed in my face a lot which was pretty traumatizing actually but I tried to shake it off.

This was in 2018. I was beginning to learn about ICE and how they were impacting my neighbors. I am still manifesting this and I hope you are too.

PS did you know that ICE agents barely make above minimum wage? It’s almost as if they . . . enjoy terrorizing communities, kidnapping people, and breaking apart families! So, you know, maybe act accordingly.

I got really into using this phrase “Black Lives Matter to God” everywhere — partly to annoy my parents — but also because I truly meant it. Whenever my kids would hang out with my parents I would dress them in their shirts that said this phrase so my mom would have to post her facebook pics of my kids wearing them (she never did). I liked carrying signs like this at protests because Christianity was still central to the reason why I was protesting.

In 2020 COVID had rocked my world and made me not want to be an evangelical anymore because man, those folks did not care whether anyone lived or died. Then things started heating up in downtown Portland. I joined the wall of moms for the BLM protests with some friends from my prayer group. I was in the midst of writing a book about Catholic anarchist Dorothy Day so I went that route with my sign. I ended up rushing up to a federal agent to show him my sign and got a whole lot of tear gas in my face as a result.

I started to slowly realize my white Christian privilege would not protect me against state violence. I went downtown one more time for more of the same tear gas and terror, just an unarmed Christian pacifist getting pummeled by reality. Inwardly I was having an existential crisis. What does it mean to live in a country where police treat people like this for holding a sign with mother mary on it?

Alleged financial crime boss Sean Feucht came to Portland later in 2020 to glom on to the attention surrounding the protests and twist it into his little evangelical grifting freak show. The man is a money and attention hog and some very cool people organized a counter protest that I went to. Look at me, clutching my little scripture sign! Look at me, trying to cling to my religion while facing off against the very people who believed wholeheartedly in it!

This is probably the most viral picture of me and it still makes the rounds of the internet every once in awhile. God, the prophetic literature really does slap sometimes.

Anyhoo I absolutely lost my faith in any type of Christianity AND humanity at this “worship” service. I was spit on, screamed at, and prayed over by all the Christians who were there to sing loudly and lustily to their god. I’m still not over how wrecked I was by this event.

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Meanwhile, in my little suburb of Portland local protests were also happening. I decided to attend them when I could and cling to the identity of a white Christian woman who was for BLM (an oxymoron in those circles). I would just look as bland and normal as possible as patriot prayer guys would livestream about how violent antifa was being then try and interrupt their videos with my blonde-haired smiling self holding up my little cardboard signs.

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I don’t think it did any good but it at least made me giggle and maybe it confused some people?

Eventually, though, those protests got nasty and I saw the police protect a bunch of patriot prayer/proud boys wearing cross necklaces and waving bear mace around and it made my heart grow cold. These weren’t federal agents I could get enraged at. These were my fucking neighbors, and it depressed me terribly. I live in a country that is full of fascists and wanna-be fascists, but everyone around me still wanted to pretend like this wasn’t our reality. I still tried to interrupt the livestreams tho.

After October 7th I went to a few protests but my spirit and energy were waning. What was this all for? Who knows. All I know is that I had to do it for me. For my kids. To connect to my true self and my core values in a time where it seemed the world was going to allow horrific atrocities to happen unchecked (spoiler alert: it did).

Now I sort of bop along to a protest when I have the energy/ability to do so and a friend or two who can be my buddy. In this season of life our kids need a lot of extra care so I can never actually make it to a protest with Krispin, but we take turns going out. We have had to have serious conversations about who can afford to get arrested and who cannot. It sucks, but it has been this way for forever and now that it has gotten even more dangerous I take my sweet time deciding where and how I want to protest. Autonomy is incredibly important to me, even (especially?) in activism.

I have been recapping the Hunger Games for our STRONGWILLED podcast and they inspired me to make some signs (and in general, the series is so achingly relevant to this moment in history!!! It’s kinda wild). I’ve had some fun times actually protesting in the past few months but I know the mood could shift at any moment.

Whenever I write about protests, people come out of the woodwork to tell me I am doing it wrong, centering myself, making no real change, blah blah blah. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I don’t blame them. But for me, I have realized that I have been doing this for awhile and it looks like I will keep doing it for as long as I can. I like being creative, I like being around other people, I like exercising my right to free speech, I like allowing the circumstances of the world to change me. Aaaaaaand sometimes I hate it and don’t go to protests because my nervous system can’t handle it. Because I’m a human being, who has experienced a lot of trauma, and whose energy levels fluctuate constantly.

Protests are one of the few American traditions I am proud to be a part of. I have had so few people in my life encourage me in my protesting, (and in fact, my parents and other community members didn’t support me at all) but I do it anyway! I also don’t feel like everyone should do it and that maybe those who aren’t as marginalized in society right now should try and step up when they can.

And remember, if the conservatives hate protests so much, it might be because they are incredibly powerful :)

To end this little ramble, here are a few brief tips I have for folks who are planning on protesting this week/weekend:

Make sure you know your core values and what you are willing to do/not do.

Be a part of the group but hold onto your individual autonomy, trust your gut, and leave when you need to leave.

Be as creative as you want to be.

Be as unremarkable/unnoticeable as you want to be.

Do not police how other people protest.

Go with friends if you can.

Live as if we already live in a surveillance state (bc we do).

If you are protesting where there will be a heavy police presence prepare accordingly. Eye protection (goggles), face masks, and water to wash out your eyes are a must.

Do not be caught unaware when the police use the weapons they have brought to break up the crowd. They WILL use them.

If you can’t protest, find ways to support those who are: mental/emotional support, donate supplies, clean-up protest areas, and financially support creatives who are out there in the streets.

And let me know in the comments if you have any other ideas for how to support the protests from afar!

Much love to everybody who is already in the throes of a long, hot, anti-fascist summer. We are with you! You are not alone! And come join me Wednesday, June 11th at 6pm PT as we gather and set some intentions for how to show up to this moment with creativity, autonomy, and as our whole selves.