THE PROPAGANDA IS JUST SO—

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)

“the sighs of tires the groans of brakes”

—Tom C. Hunley,

“Pledging Allegiance to the Middle Finger”

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.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

“YOU’RE THE ONLY PERSON WHO’S BROUGHT UP THAT QUESTION IN THIRTY YEARS”

by Ron Riekki

Protest #3—block of Professional Dr., Ann Arbor, MI, September 27, 2026 (approximate number of protestors: 31)

 

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

“God is a kite”

—Kelly Rose Hoffer

 

I went to three protests this month that turned out to be only one protest.
The first was billed as a Detroit Anti-War Committee Public Meeting.
It turned out to be an anti-meeting. It happens every Friday at 6 p.m.,
which ensures participants will face breathtakingly horrid traffic,
traffic that, on the way, just got comically more dangerous, potholes
getting deeper, people going from rolling stops at red lights to just
simply blasting right through them, illegal turns, and signs that, as
you got more to the center of Detroit, just got more confusing, as if
they were designed to make people get pulled over.  I stopped to get
gas, paid, and, walking away, the person at the counter yelled,
“No rewards?” I didn’t know what she even meant, saying, out loud,
“No.” Adding, “Just punishments.” I got to the protest, which was
a plague of abandoned buildings, a maze of haunted-house buildings,
buildings that were the opposite of building, were tearing-downs,
slowly-rottings, passersby rare, and not any clichés of pimps or
prostitutes, but instead white joggers doing white jogging in white
socks under white clouds with white ghosts hovering in the dark
broken-glass windows. One of the buildings had a Michigan
Historic Site plaque, in MSU Spartan green and white with maize
lettering, letting me know it’d previously been a recording studio, for artists
like John Lee Hooker (memorable album title of It Serve You Right
to Suffer), Johnnie Ray (memorable chart hit “What’s the Use?”), and
bad-ass Dizzy Gillespie (memorable everything). This place is holy
and abandoned. Imagine areas of Heaven where the angels have all lost
their jobs, diaspora elsewhere, dispersion to the point of no person, or
rare person, medium rare, pale, pulled by their jogging route and gone.
Pearly Gates weeded, locked, closed. Across the street is the protest.
A can’t-miss building I found hard to find, but then this window
with a NO MORE WAR sign that, the first time I misread as
NO MO’ REWARD. Signs of punishments lining the window, about
Palestine, martial law, racism, Ukraine, Ukraine again, Venezuela,
 
the Pentagon, Black Lives Mattering, genocide, apartheid, Detroit,
Iran, and a final sign I couldn’t read. Global-minded. Concerned about
the world. But absent. No one. Noon-bright in the empty evening.
Police siren noise pollution fading. The building closed. The meeting
offering no one to meet. I was interested in anti-war, but this is just
anti-. The opposite of a protest. A pre-test? A practice? Just a test?
To see if you’d come. I’ve come. For nothing. For no one. I think
of how disappointing this would be for a protestor.  Know there’s
an hour drive back. To think about wasting time.  I think of the close
to one-trillion-dollar US military budget. One trillion. Do you know
how much Republicans and Democrats have to work together
to create a one-trillion-dollar military budget? I think of the RATM
video for “Testify,” how Gore is Bush, Bush is gore, how they bore,
gush, the same rhetoric, the same party pretending to be two,
the dichotomy of the two-party system really being a craniotomy
one-party system pretending that it’s two. I sat in my car,
realized how many of these protests are absences, one protestor
in Iowa, no protestors in Detroit, where two protests equal one
person, how the listing of protests online might be fake, done
to pretend there are the 66 upcoming events posted on findaprotest
for Michigan, but how many are there? Nothing? 0.0 protests?
Or is it conservatives posting fake protests? How much of it
is smoke-and-mirages? Across the board. I think of the Ann Arbor
Human Rights Commission, how I’ve heard of complaints that it’s
fake, how hard it is to find any information online on how to file
a complaint against the quote-unquote ‘Human Rights’ Commission
that seems to be a Corporate Rights Commission, whose mission
seems to be omission. Could they form another Human Rights
Commission that will examine the practices of the Human Rights
Commission? I sat in my car thinking maybe we just sleep now in the fire.
It’s a powerful thing to show up to a protest and have no one be there.
 
It speaks volumes. Except those volumes have been book-burned.
That was the first protest. The second protest was a Jewish gentleman
standing in front of the U of M library. He looked like he was protesting.
I wanted to hear his voice. I approached, asked if he was protesting.
“No,” he said, shocked, actually, honestly, looking afraid. I apologized.
There was something about his presence, the pacing, the waiting,
where it felt he was standing there to be seen. He was. He clarified.
“It’s a Jewish holiday,” he said. I didn’t know, found out it’s Sukkot,
celebrating Israelites forty years wandering in the desert, from what
I found online.  And that’s what he looked like, felt like, like he
was wandering, wondering. When I spoke to him, there was
gentleness, but mixed with fear. He reminded me of one of the newly
partially paralyzed boys in the movie Murderball, one of my favorite
documentaries ever, deceptive title, but a film about disabled
empowerment, but a boy in the film who’d just had his accident,
freshly dealing with the reality he’d never walk again, and how
quiet-voiced he was, this revelation of how deeply life can hurt you,
how vulnerable we are, how much more vulnerable he is now
that—as a scene shows in the film—he struggles with Velcro,
how taking on and off a shoe is struggle, a motocross competitor
now competing against everything. Jesus Christ, did I cry during
viewing that film. Even though it’s filled with comedy. But this man,
telling me he’s from England, married an American, why he’s here,
shy, shyly, everything humble, but fear, this feel of fear, him asking me
why I’m talking to him, me telling him I went to Brandeis, looking
for some connection, him telling me he’s heard of it, barely, and my
shock, saying, “Brandeis?” as if the word is just filled with Jewishness.
I leave him alone. It’s not a protest. But it is, sort of, a protest.
U of M, to be honest, when I studied there, and I’ve taken classes here
and there, random, multiple universities, sometimes just one class,
a dozen universities, but University of Michigan, by far, was the most
 
anti-Semitic college I ever studied at, comments in class where I was
just shocked—from subtle anti-Jewish microaggressions to abrupt
Holocaust denial—where I turned to a student who told me she’s Jewish
and asked, after one comment, whispering to her, “What do you think
about that?” (about what was just said) and she said, “I’m used to it.”
Stayed silent. Always silent. I couldn’t believe how quiet she was.
A scared sort of silence. That was the second protest. I was done.
This was the poem… Except, driving, I saw a group of thirty or so
people walking, carrying signs. I pulled over, parked illegally, walked
quickly to them. A week ago, there’d been a couple of Palestinian protestors
and I’d tried to hurry to interview them, but they had disappeared, driving
with human-sized green-white-and-black flag with red triangle, pan-Arab
colors, young boys leaning out car windows with the energy of the maybe-
most-beautiful-woman-ever M.I.A. with her “Bad Girls” video with its
“Live fast, die young” repetition, and Moroccan keffiyeh drivers doing
drifting stunts, cars balanced on two wheels with tanker fires and land-
scapes that seem to hint at a Detroit Persian Gulf, and, like the editing
of the video, a blink and the boys were gone, impossible to interview.
So I parked quickly, rushed, not wanting to miss this obvious protest,
especially as I’d not been to one with the month ending, nothing official,
and this was. There’s a way that protestors walk, like they own the area,
and that’s what happened, as I approached, them coming down the side-
walk, with two elderly white men in crossing-guard gear acting as security,
walking straight towards me to let me know they were not moving off
of the sidewalk. I walked up, asked if I could interview one of them.
As always seems to happen, there’s a leader. A guy pointed, didn’t
want to be interviewed, said he was busy praying.  He pointed to a woman—
Sandy. The second protest I’d gone to led by a Sandy. This conjuring up
of Sandy Hook. Of Navy Seal surf torture. Of Sandy Olsson turning from
prim and proper to black skintight leather by the end of Grease, where
you felt it was Janus. I went to the wrong woman. They corrected me.
 
I tried talking to Sandy, but it was too loud with the chanting recitals
through a mic and speaker. She told me to wait three minutes and
the protest was done. We walked and arrived, nowhere, the middle
of a dead-end, a cul-de-sac, this feeling like somehow we’d arrived
somewhere, but I looked around and it felt utterly random. They prayed,
“We want you to close this place down.” What place? They prayed
more. The realization that this was an anti-abortion protest. Shirts
of PRAY TO END ABORTION and I WAS ONE WAY AND NOW I’M
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Their ages everything, from eight
to eight decades. It ends. I talk with Sandy. As I do, men come over,
interrupt. I know this is just my opinion, one I’m sure people would
love to argue with, but I kinda think any abortion discussion should
be women-led. When the men would come over, they wanted to control
the conversation, yanking it in completely different directions than where
Sandy was heading, so that I asked her just that, “Should men listen more
when the discussion is about abortion?” She said, basically, no, that
they’re just as much invested, that abortion affects mothers and fathers,
and, especially, the babies. The word ‘babies’ gets spoken of a lot
during the talk. I ask the hard questions. What about rape? She tells me
“Eighty percent” of raped women don’t want an abortion. I don’t know
about the accuracy, but ask, using that figure, about the twenty percent
who do. They talk about “all” the alternatives.  “Like what?” I ask.
“Give the baby up.” To? “Foster care.” I talk about foster care statistics,
how much abuse happens in foster care. A man takes over, says, “You just
have to do the research.” But about forty percent of foster care children
do experience abuse. I ask about poverty. How what we’re really talking
about is doing forced pregnancies on the poor.  Sandy tells me that women
who’ve had abortions have increased statistics for alcoholism, suicidality,
drug use. I wonder if it’s chicken vs. egg, if it’s more complicated than
what she’s saying. I ask about overpopulation, that if there’s the 73 million
abortions globally per year, that it means by 2040 we’d have an added
 
increase of one billion people to the population, a population already
estimated to be 9.2 billion, so it’d make it 10.2 billion, and how those
pregnancies would directly impact some of the poorest areas of the world,
that you can’t talk about global banning of all abortion (always) without
discussing an obvious population explosion caused by it. She says,
“You’re the only person who’s brought up that question in thirty years.”
I tell her that it needs to be discussed. She’s honest, tells me she’s never
considered it, hasn’t done the research. I encourage her to do the research.
I ask her hard questions. She never turns to emotion, never shouting at me,
no frustration, anger, an anger I’ve seen so common at other protests,
one in Berkeley I remember where what was shouted through megaphones
had nothing to do with logic, but just sheer rage. I ask her why,
why she’s being so grounded, even when I’m pushing her about real
problems with global banning of all abortion that doesn’t consider
how it’s so much more complex than that. She tells me two things.
She says the left doesn’t come from logic, but only emotion, because,
she says, “They don’t have the truth.” She also says she’s coming
from “love,” not hate, telling me, “I hate no one.”  She tells me
about women coming out of abortion clinics post-abortion and
not judging, but asking if they could pray with the women, how
they’d cry doing that, appreciating it. To be honest, she feels like
her main root issue with doing this is because she loves family.
The problem, of course, is that it’s her conception of family
and her choices she wants everyone to follow. But her heart
is worlds away from anti-abortion violence. I ask what she’s
doing to create change. She says, “Praying.” I ask what else
and she says that she works to get other people to pray too,
to stop this, says it’s succeeding, that abortion clinics are closing
across the U.S. I ask the statistics for that and she says nine
abortion clinics have closed in Michigan. She feels it’s because
of prayer. I ask if it’s because of Trump. She smiles. I say,
 
“You love Trump?” She says, “What’s not to love?” I think
about that question. What’s not to love about the President?
I ask if the Planned Parenthood nearby’s open, figuring, perhaps,
they might supply me with some responses to that question.
She tells me it’s closed. I ask why she’s here now, why she
isn’t here when it’s open. “Oh,” she says, “We’re here for
forty days.” Tells me from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. For forty days.
I think of Sukkot. I think of the world population in 2040.
I think of forty percent of foster care children being abused.
I think of 40-oz. malt liquor. I think of less than forty percent
of rape being reported to law enforcement. I think of Jesus’
forty days in the wilderness. I think of the forty days of rain
of Noah’s flood. I think of the more than 440,000 rapes and
sexual assaults occurring in the U.S. each year. I think of
two in forty women in the U.S. experiencing a pregnancy
from rape or sexual coercion. I think it’s more complicated
than forty days of prayer, from September 23 to November 1,
the Day of the Dead. I think of the Bible quote for Matthew
2:40, how the quote from Matthew 2:40 says so much, and
what it says—as I’m sure you all know—is that it doesn’t
exist, because Matt only goes up to 2:23, but it doesn’t matter, 
because it could be any quote and I’ve heard Bible quotes taken
in every direction you could imagine, one of the most brilliant
things I’ve ever experienced being a New Testament class at CMU,
with Dr. Reader, a man who was exactly that, as well-read
as any human I’ve met, who knew ancient Greek, Hebrew,
Aramaic, destroyed anti-gay misinterpretations, mistranslations
where he’d say, “Let’s look at the original language,” and you’d
realize the quote wasn’t talking about homosexuality, but about
pedophilia, which is different, monstrously different,
and how he knew the language, did the work, didn’t just
take the Bible in whatever translation was offered, but
realized every choice the translator was making. And
there’s a translation that happens when talking about
abortion, a translation we do with our lives, where what
we’ve experienced and our view based upon our experience
becomes the answer for everyone else, when, my God,
it’s a lot more complicated. But my hat’s off to who can
discuss it with love. Romans 12:2: Do not conform to the pattern
of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

 

(CAN WE PLEASE GO BACK IN TIME &) MAKE THE GREAT LAKES GREAT AGAIN

by Ron Riekki

For the longest time, the Great Lakes have been

Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior, a bond

between US and Canada that affectionately became

abbreviated to H.O.M.E.S.  But now, to bend

that bond, eerily, the inferior (five-letter too) named

President wants to change it to Superior, Huron,

America, Michigan, Erie, which will from now on

link Trump to the new abbreviation: S.H.A.M.E.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice. 

FOLLOW ME

by Ron Riekki

Protest #2—Stone School Bridge, Ann Arbor, MI, August 14, 2026 (approximate number of protestors: 20)

“Two roads diverged”

—Robert Frost,

“The Road Not Taken”

When I got home, I realized I was having my first serious headache in a long while.

I stood on the bridge, staring at the cars going by on the freeway, a break from the conversations where we were yelling to communicate.

I stood counting the number of vehicles that were beeping.

Out of the first fifty, none beeped.

The second fifty, sixteen.

The average car gave about three beeps.

They were doing this for the beeps.

Of course, more than that, but also the beeps.

About six or seven cars out of a hundred beeped.

Mostly, because they were driving seventy-some miles per hour, with cars all around.

They had signs taped up to the bridge’s fence.

Plenty of them:

JAIL TRUMP 25^TH NOW

We the people RESIST

SHE HASN’T SHUT THE HECK UP FOR 3 DAYS

DEFEND DEMOCRACY LINCOLN SQUARE

HAIL NO Los Alamos Data Center

HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR & GREED

Some of the signs not even facing the drivers, but facing them, like reminders of why they’re there.

I can’t imagine the drivers actually being able to read the signs.

But it’s not about the signs.

It’s about the presence of people, seeing people on a bridge, knowing they’re protestors, even if you have no idea what they’re protesting.

Protesting isn’t protesting—

the way I’ve gone to church and realized church isn’t church.

Sometimes it’s networking, sometimes it’s singing, sometimes it’s duty, sometimes it’s because a person you’d like to date is there, sometimes guilt, sometimes longing for God, sometimes because your Mom made you.

A hundred reasons.  More.

It’s the same here.

I ask people why they’re here and they talk about:

data centers and Trump and trans rights and the complexities of the prison-industrial complex and class issues and there’s no brand no slogan no capitalistic approach to the protest.

The protest is just a protest,

a quiet (very loud) protest.

I get pointed to Sandy, quickly, in her yellow vest, her READ BOOKS. WALK DOGS. FIGHT FASCISTS. ballcap.

She’s been doing this weekly since February 2025, the lead organizer, when “terrible things started” and she predicted “a lot of bad stuff to come.”

I take her to the side of the bridge, the end of the fence, where she says, “That’s enough,” not wanting to go further, not trusting me.

Not trusting runs through the group.

One wears a body cam, “in case.”

They wear dark sunglasses.

Two self-appointed guards watch the cars where they’re parked;

they tell me of five, six of the cars having their tires slashed one time, discovered when they got done, the sun down, telling me of how hard it is when you’re tired, realize you can’t drive, have to wait for multiple tow trucks.

They never caught the person, worries they’ll return.

They tell me of a car swerving towards them.

Talking to the two car-guards, a car goes by and the passenger in back leans out the window, half of his body outside the car, and screams, quick, the feel like it was done to frighten.

There’s a lot of what SNL comedian Michael Che calls “white jogging,” shirtless tan men who run by as if the protest is just people standing in line.

Quite a few black people walk by, none participating in the protest.

It’s a very white protest, an elderly leaning protest, peaceful, non-confrontational, on the outskirts of Ann Arbor.

Sandy tells me 14,000 to 15,000 cars pass by when they do this

I-95.

Sandy tells me their messages change every week.

Last week it was: Michigan is not for sale.

She focuses on class issues,

is relaxed, very, like she’s home, a very noisy home.

She tells me “460 bridges are doing the same thing right now” as part of the Visibility Brigade.

Even if the visibility is a driver seeing them for a split-second.

But that visibility, based on the numbers Sandy gives, means 6 to 7 million cars are seeing these people on these bridges.

“We’re not in anybody’s way,” Sandy says.

I ask if protests are about getting in people’s way, if that’s the point.

“I chose this bridge,” she says, for safety, the roadway separated from the trail for joggers, for protestors.

She says it’s a joint protest, with their presence, and the motorists joining in with “honking and waving.”

I see no waves in the hundred cars I watched, but honking, yes, the semis like sperm whales, the loudest animal on Earth, 230 decibels.

I have no idea how the protestors stay there longer than a few minutes.

For Sandy, it’s a commitment to “get the money out of politics.”

And a despair.

But where “the antidote to despair is action,”

admits she’s not sure where she’s getting the quote from,

the internet insisting it’s Joan Baez.

It’s female-led, this protest.

Multiple grandmotherly types smile at me, welcoming.

They don’t talk to me, due to the inability to speak over the engine after engine after engine, as if America is all gas and metal and oil.

I yell to Landon, a red-haired, laid back, calm man who tells me he’s “on vacation.”

I ask why he’d go to a protest when on vacation.

He yells back that he can’t stand MAGA, that “it’s a cult, it’s a cult!”

adds, “I’m not part of the cult!”

He’s an Ohioan, tells me about the protests down there.

I’m surprised at how laid back everyone is, positive, focused.

I ask Landon if he ever gets exhausted from breathing in all the exhaust, but he just shakes his head no, something monk-like about him, in all the positive ways you think of monks.

I go to leave, the traffic fading fast behind me,

the liminal point between concrete and forest off to the side,

this infinity of reasons why each person is here,

the mix of messages,

and the strong need to connect.

I talk with Gordon, body cammed, but the conversation goes nowhere, mostly because it’s all being recorded, not as open as Sandy, him dressed in police blue.

I go to leave, feeling content.

I can be a bit anti-protest sometimes.

It comes from living in Berkeley, memories of seeing bloody footprints after one of the protests, a streetlight corpsed in the road, a bank I disliked with windows shattered, walking by at one point when a person walked up and put their megaphone to my ear, screaming into it, realizing, later, that, oh, I’d forgotten I’d been wearing an American flag T-shirt and got mistaken for a Trump supporter, but the tinnitus making me a bit angry at the aggression, people I saw, on both sides, who were there to fight, in my opinion, stories of skinheads trucking down from northern California solely for the purpose to confront.

But every single one of the protestors here was focused on getting semis to honk,

the way I used to do as a kid,

there for support,

to support,

more than to protest,

to be unified.

I respected that.

I was just about to leave, when I figured I’d chat with the two car-guards, one final talk.

They reminded me of Through the Looking-Glass characters, a bit of Jeff Daniels’ behavior, 2014-era, to them, standing side by side, one wearing two walkie-talkies that I had as a child,

the two having, comically, the same stance.

I told them I understood their presence now, the vandalism.

One of them implied that’s what conservatives do—vandalize.

We gabbed.

I acted as a devil’s advocate, asking if Democrats and Republicans need to work together, not treat each other as binary opposites.

Asked if it might be time better spent to get involved in politics for actual change rather than just collectively standing on a bridge.

You could feel the discomfort growing.

I’m someone who can be convinced,

always looking for logic, for counterargument,

like to do point counterpoint,

to learn,

to see new ways of viewing things,

but the questions just aggravated.

Maybe it was that it was two-against-one,

maybe it was that they do see things as binary,

that questioning means opposition

and not enquiry.

I told them everyone seems to be here for different reasons,

asked why they were here,

and the conversation turned to their concern of U of M stopping any help for transgender transition.

I scribbled fast, asking if that’s true.

I was shocked, asked their names.

One told me she’d be angry if she was quoted directly.

I won’t quote her directly,

won’t name her.

I pushed for more information that the university medical was banning transgender medical assistance.

Then she changed it to that it applied to under 18 only.

A big difference.

They didn’t see it as a big difference.

I asked how young someone should be able to transition.

And one said,

“We’re done.”

Said they’d say no more,

the interview was over.

Same thing as happened to me at protest 1.

I keep thinking protestors are there to discuss,

that I wanted to learn,

wanted to hear perspective.

She said, “Come on, follow me,” and walked away.

The other one followed.

I thought protesters would fight for what they believe in, would be OK with being questioned, would actually even be able to expand the way I looked at something, give me ammunition that would help me fall even more strongly on their side.

I walked to my car, looked at the tires, all fine.

Every protest is different.

Every protestor is different.

But there’s a strong need I felt there from them to belong,

to connect,

to follow.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.