Child Separation Rally & March in Winston-Salem, North Carolina

I spent the morning working on the computer, and then headed down to local rally against the child separation and other atrocities happening on the Mexico border.  The rally here in Winston-Salem was at this area I refer to as "dog poop park," a rectangular chunk of grass on 4th Street near Trade.  It's near the center of downtown, but there are no shade trees, no playground, just a chunk of grass.  So that's where a lot of dogs end up pooping.  People are good about picking up after their dogs, though. 

With the huge national outrage about the children being separated under the Trump policy, and the fact that we now have child and adult concentration camps in the U.S., I really had no idea what kind of turnout would be there.   And yes, the "tent cities" and "detention centers" are, BY DEFINITION, concentration camps, and I will always refer to them that way. 

It's 91 degrees and humid today, hot even by NC standards, so I bought a bottle of water, and sat on a bench where I could hear the speakers.  I'd say the crowd was probably 400-600 people.  Honestly, I was expecting more in a city of 241,000 people.  The crowd was pretty mixed racially, which was good to see.  There were quite a few upscale white people, many several people of all ages, and some Latinos.  The activists speaking talked about the things activists usually talk about.  The subjects covered by them ranged across the current issues.

When they started to march West on 4th street, I headed the other direction.  I walked one block East to the corner of Liberty and 4th.  I stopped on the corner and gave the finger to the Jim Crowe era, Confederate soldier statue there.  A 60-something, upscale couple in a really nice SUV was confused by my actions. My middle finger didn't accomplish anything, except to express my thoughts towards the elitist, racist, 300+ year reign or intimidation, terrorism, enslavement, physical brutality, and murder that built the American South.  As we know well these days, plenty of that mindset survives even now. 

We'll see what happens on the child separation issue, the immigration issues, and the overall issue of whether The United States of America will become the brutal, oppressive, totalitarian dictatorship that Donald Trump, his "Base," and Congressional Republican are working hard to create right now, or if the other 310 million of us will uphold the principles that America was built on.  It could go either way right now.  Time will tell. 

Remember folks, totalitarianism is government of the cowards, by the cowards, and for the cowards.  And it's a CHOICE.  Personally, I'm a fan of democracy. 

As for me now... back to work...