protests on protests on protests

Another day, another march. This one in support of science (which, as many others have noted, is a crazy thing to have to support. 'I support facts!' Who knew that was something we'd have to announce, or fight for? Anyway, it was a great turnout, with lots of fun signs, and an interesting array of speakers.

One thing that has been interesting to watch over the course of this year (it's only been ~100 days!) is the development of a professional march infrastructure (or maybe the scientists are just more organized). The first marches had all sorts of sound and space issues. This march had great sound, great optics, they left a space for the speaker and had people organized on the steps. It was well done. And I imagine when (not if) the next march happens (which I hope will not be in the summer, because nobody should be outside in Arkansas in summer!) the lessons learned so far will be applied to make an even better march.

Of course, in Arkansas, it's not clear to me that the politicians, elected with shedloads of outside money, care in the slightest what their constituents think. I've been using an app to send letters to my congresspeople (the app is another development of the resistance culture that has sprung up this year) and I've only heard anything back from one of them, Rep. French Hill, on one topic, which basically said 'I don't want to abolish the EPA, just make it completely unable to do its job'. So, winning?

I've become more involved with the Democratic party here in my county. A friend pointed out that the party is what the party does, and what the party does here in Faulkner County is basically what I, and a small group of people actually committed to making things happen, tell it to do. So we'll try, here, to make changes, and I guess the real test of all this will come in 2018. By which time who knows how bad things will be?