by Ron Riekki
Protest #4—downtown Bardstown, KY; Kentucky Ave., Bowling Green, KY; and Memorial Blvd., Springfield, TN, October 17, 2026 (approximate number of protestors: 30)
Where is the protest? I’m finding the difficulty is finding them.
Or at least for me. Maybe it’d be easier in France, with its 800,000
protestors and 1,200 arrests. In fact, looking up the daily news,
the highlighted articles showed fires and tear gas. I thought, at first,
it was the U.S., but it was France, the country where my ex- is from,
her telling me, “Americans don’t know how to protest,” saying that
we’re “weak” when it comes to protesting. But today it’s an estimated
8 million protestors, which isn’t quite the 20 million 1970 Earth Day
protestors, which is tied to the creation of the EPA and Clean Air Act,
the EPA currently supporting environmental deregulation, less
environmental restrictions, pro-coal, anti-environmental justice,
the current head of the EPA believing climate change is no threat.
I drive. My tailpipe emissions not helping things. And I drive far.
I could’ve went anywhere, the online claims of “hundreds” or maybe
“thousands” of protestors in L.A., police on horseback, cinematic
mass marching, but I wanted to head to the more ignored middle
America—Kentucky, Tennessee—to see what the protests would be
like there, here, but, again, in Bardstown, I can’t find them. Perhaps
I picked too small of a town to start, the goal of getting to more
than one protest today. On the drive, I pass an odd cross between
Disneyland and bourbon, what I assume is the Jim Beam head-
quarters; I imagine a Pirates of the Caribbean ride inside with
actual drunken pirates. There’s no time to stop and find out. Instead,
I drive around Bardstown looking for protestors, give up, and head
for Bowling Green where I find traffic at the level of L.A. Following
the followers, I pull into a city lawn where cars are pretending it’s
a parking lot. I’m sure I’ve found the protest and expect it to be
huge, people getting out and heading in one direction. I ask
a random person what it is. He says it’s a “festival.” I ask what
kind and he says, “With booths, food, those kind of things.”
Not the protest. I walk, looking for the protest, pass a home
with Halloween decorations so elaborate I have to stop to admire,
particularly a Headless Horseman so realistic I feel it might lop
off my head any moment. Across the street, I see a woman going
through garbage. She turns to me, sensing she’s being looked at,
reminds me of the witch from Snow White, nothing villainous
about her whatsoever, except she’s old, how that’s what’s
monstrous, simply aging, poverty, how ‘monster’ representations
so often just look old, look poor, look disabled. Lost in thought,
I get to the listed address for the protest. But no one’s there.
An org named Indivisible put these protests together, but
I’m starting to think a better name for it would be Invisible.
I give up, figure I’ll head to Franklin, Kentucky, another
protest listing, but on the drive I stumble upon the Bowling
Green protest, pull over quickly, and ask for the head of it.
“Kathy.” They can’t find her. I ask who’s the second in
charge. A man in a Superman costume says, “I am, I guess.”
We sit on concrete. These protests, I’m finding, always
have car exhaust. I cough. Superman vapes, the smoke
coming at my face. I ask him if he can not vape the rest
of the interview. Kindly, he agrees. It’s odd interviewing
Superman. I imagine calling him Clark Kentucky, but
he infos his name’s Brenton. He’s pure working class.
Tatted like mad. He opens with “We are nonviolent,
first and foremost.” He’s got a prominent gun tattoo
on his arm, hard not to notice it. I ask about the costume
instead. He says, “Voting is our superpower.” He looks
like he just walked out of a Henderson County strip mine
night shift. It’s near the end of the protest. There’s about
thirty people, energetic, holding signs encouraging voting.
It doesn’t feel like a protest, but more like the vibe you get
when people on the side of the road want you to go to their
car wash to raise money for a local church. It’s positive,
friendly. No police presence, except I know TN and KY
is the heart of Flock cameras, license plate readers, how
there’s been cases of police using them to track protestors,
so no police presence doesn’t mean no police presence.
But tracking these protestors would be like investigating
everyone who bought licorice this past week. It’d be point-
less. Brenton tells me the protestors peaked at forty earlier.
Surprisingly, and quickly, he starts talking about the need
for bipartisanship. There’s absolutely no aggression to him.
He’s not pissed. Not raging against AI machines. He just
wants to encourage people to vote, saying that “90%” of
the time Democrats and Republicans actually agree, but
we focus on the ten-percent difference. He talks about
being pro-gun, very pro-, owns five, talks about his bedside
fingerprint biometric home safe that holds a loaded weapon
for “home security.” I ask if he lives in a dangerous neighbor-
hood. “No,” he says. The entirety of the conversation,
he’s logical, grounded, calm, but, honestly, the only moments
where I feel logic gets thrown out the window is when he
talks about gun ownership, so I move passed it. He’s here
for voting, not for guns. We discuss Kamala Harris owning
a Glock, and he says that, in his opinion, Democrats in
the U.S. are really on the right, that you only get liberals,
true liberals, in other countries, like Europe, that progressives
here are nowhere near socialism, that the right is right in the U.S.
and the left is basically right too, just more centrist. He tells me
about barbecuing with Republicans and being able to get along
with them no problem. I ask if this is a southern thing, if he has
to be bidialectal, needs to be conservative conversative, that I’ve
found California liberals can be combative because they can be
combative, that they’re so in the majority that they can act and
speak as if there are no shades of gray. Here, there has to be gray.
Perhaps Confederate Gray, but gray. He says “Southern Baptists
aren’t conservative or liberal. They’re both.” I know both-and
thinking doesn’t tend to go well with politics. He says that he
“can’t be the stereotypical blue-haired woman in Seattle,” that
Kentucky requires a different type of politics. I ask if he’d ever run.
No, he says quickly, but I encourage him. He speaks, to be honest,
a bit like a politician, and I don’t mean that negatively. He says,
“Most of my best friends are MAGA Republicans,” and I think
how difficult that must be, how much control of language you’d
need to have, how much tolerance, but it’s not a struggle for him.
He has a degree in Pastoral Ministry, speaks of Jesus, and
I ask if that’s where he gets the liberal POV. He talks of
doing a ministry in Panama, seeing true poverty there, has
a commemorative tattoo of Panama on his arm, and I ask if
that’s where his liberal views kicked in, being confronted
“after seeing the poorest people you’ll ever see,” in his words,
but, no, it’s not that. It’s a mix. It’s not one thing that makes
him lean liberal, centrist-liberal, passionate-about-voting liberal.
He says that if someone came and robbed his house, he wouldn’t
shoot to kill, but would shoot them in the leg. I wonder if that’s
the difference between Republicans and gun-owning Democrats,
if liberals shoot in the leg and conservatives aim for the center of
the forehead. We end with tattoos. One marked CANDY MONEY,
a memory of his grandfather’s piggybank, buying him sweets as a boy.
A bird on his elbow. How he loves birds. You can sense that
little boy inside him. A little boy with a skull tattoo he shares
with me . . . I head to my third protest. Tennessee. The lead organizer,
another woman. Literally, every single protest I’ve been to, all
of them have been organized by women. Except they can’t find
her either, busy, off somewhere. This protest, easy to find. A very
busy intersection. Where my first thought is worry about their
safety. I speak with the second in charge. Jana Mandes. Says
I can use her full name. Dressed as Rosie the Riveter. There’s
a lot of costumes—a couple nearest to the intersection dressed
as frogs. I think. Either frogs or dinosaurs. Halloween’s nearing,
so it’s fitting. It’s also not really a protest. This is more camaraderie
with a purpose: to vote. It’s harmless. I can’t imagine anyone being
upset about this. I say this to Jana. Shortly after, someone in a truck
drives near the curb, on purpose, and guns their engine so a thick
black smoke explodes out, keeping the engine gunned until passing
the protestors. An f-word without speaking. I tell Jana it’s worse
than cursing, that this affects the lungs. It smells like fascism,
like ignorance. That’s it though. After that, it’s all supportive
honks, waves, just people driving. On the ground, Jana places
her VOTE EARLY NOW—OCT 29th sign. She sits lotus-ish.
Similar to Brenton, I notice the little girl in her right away.
Charming. Positive energy where you feel she understands
chakras and reiki. It’s impossible not to like her. I notice tats
too. She shows me a “soul of a bird” tattoo. I tell her about
Brenton’s bird tattoo. I ask why she’s here. She gets to ICE
quickly, stories of Tennessee arrests, people paying parking
tickets, then finding themselves surrounded. She talks of
schools suffering funding, about white Christian nationalism.
She talks of the “violent lib” representations, but that she’s
peaceful. It’s obvious. She exudes it. It’s wonderful to see.
She views herself as more “independent” than liberal though.
I think of Brenton not liking the liberal tag either, wonder
if this is, again, a southern thing, that there’s too many
negative connotations to liberal here, so it’s easier to be
“centrist” or “independent.” The protests feel the same
with each state I’ve been in—Tennessee or Kentucky or
Michigan or Iowa—but the protestors feel exceptionally
different. Jana talks about “losing so many of our rights”
and I ask what rights she’s losing, but she says, “not me
in particular” and I like that she’s concerned about others,
“because I’m white I have a certain privilege,” she adds.
She’s open, not at all angry, very grounded, sitting on
the ground, so I ask her about the Democratic Party’s
transition, how it used to be almost obvious that liberals
ran on three main focuses, with the 2008 Dem Party
presidential primaries as perhaps the cliche of those
three, with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John
Edwards, where race, gender, and class were at the heart
of liberal interests, a sort of “I love blacks,” “I love women,”
“I love the poor” worldviews, and, just to get her thoughts,
the wonder if that has all changed and now Democrats,
instead, because of social media, are running under
stances that flip this upside-down and it’s become
“I hate whites,” “I hate men,” “I hate the wealthy,”
if Democrats have gotten more vicious, where, I told
her, I was in a social justice class and one of the students
said, “We need to be more aggressive, like Trump,” and
the shock I had that this liberal was saying Democrats
need to be more like Trump-y. I thought, if anything,
they’d want to be the opposite of him, not more like
him. I paused, wanted her reaction to what I was
saying, that liberals have gotten more aggressive,
more negative, had lost the love and support that I’d
felt in the party back in the day. Her hands touching
the grass, she said that it was an interesting thing to hear,
that it was good for her to hear, that she’d be sure not
to support that, things like “I hate men” messaging.
I remembered talking with two liberal women in
Michigan and how shaking-upset they were when
I tried to talk to them. I wonder about that. Is it good?
To be that passionate? Or does it cloud your judgement?
Make it so you can’t learn? Can’t listen? Jana listened,
took it in, moved on. She talked about “animal welfare,”
taking care of “pit bulls.” It made me think of Brenton
having barbecue with MAGA. How they both gravitate
towards MAGA and the most dangerous dog breed.
How they’re not surrounding themselves with only those
with opinions they agree with, only being around Labrador
retrievers, beagles. I bring up the person who spewed black
smoke in everyone’s faces, ask how that makes her feel when
something like that happens. She says, “I kind of feel sad
for them,” shocking me that she’s more concerned for those
who want to hurt, to disrupt a peaceful protest. She says
she understands how much “propaganda” is out there, realizes
a lot of conservatives here “live paycheck to paycheck,” talks
about how maybe they don’t have the education that allows one
to understand complex liberal views, adds, “We grew up in a poor
family.” She goes back, says, “The propaganda is just so—”
She doesn’t even have the word for it, allows her voice to trail off.
I think that’s pretty much the perfect way of wording it.
