The Tricky Business of Protests and Good Hair

Can they ever co-exist?

The more unobstructed authoritarian stuff that goes rolling by largely un-commented upon every day, the fewer ways I can find to comfort myself. When the president of the United States explains that his thought process about dropping bombs and killing people is “No one knows what I am going to do…I like to make a final decision one second before it’s due,” (and a little thing we used to call “Congress” no longer seems to play any part in decisions about war because apparently our entire government is now just one dumb person big) the only thing I can think of to say to myself is “Well, at least peaceful protests are making a come-back.”

But now that last Saturday’s big showing is already starting to seem like it was forever ago, I find myself hoping that it doesn’t fade from memory too quickly. Or turn out to be another one-off like The Amazing Woman’s March of 2017 turned out to be. At the time, it seemed like such a harbinger of ready-to-be-harnessed power and action. The signs! The slogans and all that inclusive energy. It seemed so rousing and portentous that I never imagined it might dissolve into untraceable sub atomic quarks and leptons. Or be supplanted by a suddenly omni-present tribe of Maga-faced women sporting the lip-implants and the cheek implants and the contour makeup and those blank but glarey eyes. Of course I recognize them. Part of the ritual of attending high school in this country is moving past the reign of these women who somehow seem to own every high school. But I really didn’t expect them to stage a successful return.

Yesterday in the New York Times, Barack Obama verbalized what I have been worrying about: “We now have a situation in which all of us are going to be tested in some way and we are going to have to decide what our commitments will be.” Standing up for what you believe has always been a tricky tightrope to walk in this country. (And fingers crossed we continue to have a country that still believes in a healthy assortment of tightrope options.)

When reflecting on my own lengthy history of attending protests, I definitely have to give myself points for starting out with a bang. Not everyone makes the front page of their local paper their very first time out.

Yep. That’s me and my Dad right at the front. My Dad is rising to meet the moment with a big smile aimed right at the camera. I, of course, am staring down because I am the only one in this photograph who is actually being rained on.

I’m proud that my family raised me to attend protests. In the version of this country that I grew up in, protesting was the most important civilized way to push back against a political agenda you didn’t like. That said, when my Dad cheerfully handed me the newspaper so I could see that photo, he had not the faintest understanding of the kind of humiliation that a 15 year old girl might experience after she realizes that she is on display in a public forum with her hair looking really really bad. That the photo also marked me as a person with the right kind of values about civil rights and fair housing didn’t seem to matter as much in that moment.

The way I saw it, here was incontrovertible, photographic proof that I had failed at my attempts to construct crowd-pleasing hair. Even now, when I see that photo, all I can think of is the amount of time I put into trying to rat the top portion and the bangs into the acceptable poofy bubble that every cute/popular girl at my brand new school was somehow able to effortlessly achieve, every single day. We had only been in the San Francisco Bay Area for a few months. My family had just relocated from Florida and I was trying my hardest to fit in with a group of kids with whom it seemed like I had nothing in common. Because I felt pretty sure that my acceptance into their culture was hanging by a frayed thread, I knew for sure that this lame front page photo was going to have the power to dissolve any possible points I’d accumulated thus far. It seemed like the kind of crisis from which there could be no recovery.

I saw myself as positioned, on a precipitous ledge, with no options except to try emulate the details of every single thing I saw the rest of them doing. And this included forcing myself to mispronounce words in my French class to match the way the cuter-more-popular kids were all confidently mangling their attempts at speaking French. That was sinking pretty low for me since my mother spoke French and had been instructing me for years on how to do that raspy back-of-the-throat French gargled R sound. Now it was clear to me that being the only one in the class who was pretentious enough to try for a realistic French accent was definitely going to be the kind of thing that would get me black-listed for life. The LAST thing I needed was to throw in this frightening new public hair embarrassment. There was a good chance I could never show my face at school again.

I might still be in hiding if it hadn’t occurred to me, the very next day, that not one of these so-called popular kids would ever intentionally glance at the front page of The Palo Alto Times. It was so far below their radar that even if I bought them all a copy, chances were good that they might check the sports page and then throw the rest of the paper on the ground. (And even if, by accident, they then looked down and caught a glimpse of that front page in their peripheral vision, chances were good that they wouldn’t have recognized me. Most of them didn’t even know my name.)

Of course, not too long after that, I found a different more sympatico crowd of kids to hang out with. They were connected to the drama department and not only did none of them seem remotely aware of the existence of my shameful photo descent into bad hair, but it seemed like all of them went to protests. And, as an unexpected bonus, none of them ratted their hair into a bubble.

Of course, little did I suspect that one day I would turn into someone who would intentionally draw attention to my moment-of-hair-shame simply because I needed something timely to post on Substack.

Obviously now I’m kind of proud that I saved that silly photo. And of all the additional protests i attended over the years. My next stop after high school was 6 years of UC Berkeley where the number of protests I attended was in the millions. (Okay I am exaggerating. But I’m pretty sure that number was at least in the tens.) I chanted. I distributed pamphlets. I marched all over San Francisco and Oakland to protest the Vietnam War. I was even tear gassed by The National Guard when Ronald Reagan stationed A LOT of them all over the city of Berkeley for weeks in 1969.

I guess if Barack Obama were here, I would try to reassure him that my level of commitment to protecting democracy and civil rights and equality and the bill of rights has remained unflagging for decades. The things he believes are worth fighting for are the same ones I was raised to believe were the bedrock of this culture. It’s hard to wrap my brain around the idea of this country is trying to reassemble itself as a place where protests are looked down upon. Again.

So I guess I am writing this in the hope that there will continue to be peaceful civic actions for us all to attend. And that they will be powerful enough to provide the kind of push back that might even remind the two houses of congress that they exist and are supposed to be in the governing business.

But in closing I would like to share this little discussed but hard-won protest veteran’s lesson : When attending any significant public protest, expect that there will be cameras. And insure yourself the best possible hair result by remembering to wear a hat.