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Hands Off, at the Washington Monument, in DC [1]
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Date: 2025-04-05
Woke up this morning feeling I had to go down to the Mall to attend the Hands Off protest. No big expectations, orange Mussolini is out of town.
Got off from the northern Red Line train, at Farragut-north station. There were fence barricades set up for a block radius away from the existing 10 foot spiked White House fence. They didn’t want a crowd close up. Cops everywhere. Told one policeman he had my sympathies doing guard duty for this guy. He laughed.
Walked to the memorial about 10:30 am, crowd was straggling in from every direction
Found an entire line of porta-potties on the north side of the mall grass with police tape and steel zip ties through the lock points. They really didn’t want us there, or breaking plastic ties.... The southern porta-potties were operating — nothing is accidental
The crowd shuffled in over several hours, 30 k early, with maybe 20 k coming in from the east, via the Smithsonian train station blue line
The stage was the existing park stage — near the white awning on the left of the above photo, a small stage buried in a natural bowl, using a tiny sound system.
Couldn’t see the speakers, which didn’t matter because we couldn’t hear them either. Missed opportunity. Wanted to listen to Rep Jamie Raskin, but it was not possible.
Saw CSPAN truck, and thought that watching would have been the best viewing method
Stayed around for couple of hours. Saw T-shirts echoing John Lewis’ ‘good trouble’ quote. But there was no trouble of any sort.
Mostly old retirees and teenagers. Those with time and those who cared about injustice.
I was dressed for rain, but it was dry, if cloudy
Common refrain was ‘the stupidity and illegality’ — with a shake of the head, and an equal dislike of Musk.
Cell phone service [T-mobile for me] was overwhelmed, and there were dead spots in the bowl area. The promise of 5G was huge bandwidth, and huge parallel connectivity. Not quite. Come on guys and gals, get on it.
Had to go touch the Washington monument [see photo at corner] a secular artifact of our civilization. Part of the reason I had to go, was to try and express that it was wrong to attack that civilization.
Read later that orange Mussolini had literally juggled tariff schemes and ‘chosen’ at the last minute (like he does for everything) from several options. No particular rational other than it felt good. Not impressed.
No great accomplishment, but I rubbed shoulders with thousands of people who strongly had to express something.
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