Letter: Writer wrong about power of protest
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Editor,
In the Sound Off column in your April 22 edition, the writer says that protesting on No Kings Day is a “pretty weak strategy” and “those efforts would be better spent doing something that has direct benefit to the community, like donating blood…”
Could I point out that the two are not mutually exclusive? Spending effort to protest does not eliminate an individual’s other avenues of social and political activism. “No, dear, I can’t donate blood because I attended a protest yesterday.” Excuse me?
The writer judges protest efforts such as contacting our political representatives to be an ineffective waste of time. As support, they offer that “110,000 people signed in to oppose the state’s new income tax.” And the new income tax became law anyway.
1) People protested.
2) It did not influence the outcome.
3) Ergo, protesting is a waste of time.
Excuse me? Using that line of reasoning as support for an opinion would be unacceptable in a freshman English composition where critical thinking and logic are minimum requirements.
The writer suggests, with cynicism I find hyperbolic, that public input is largely ineffective because politicians are for the most part corrupt and don’t care, or are incompetent and politically blind. Not the ones I vote for.
To me, what the writer is saying is dangerously close to saying, “Why bother to vote?” in a democracy. Why bother to make your voice heard (voting) or trying to make your voice heard (protesting)?
If We the People do not vote and do not try to make our voices heard, we do not have a democracy. I like living in a democracy. I, for one, prefer not to live under totalitarianism, fascism, capitalistic oligarchism. So I continue to try to make my voice heard. I have not succumbed to cynicism despite the fact that We the People voted for a misogynistic felon showman on the verge of senility who has no discernible moral compass to be our President.
The writer concludes by saying that “the best place” to find “ways to engage and influence policy” is “in our communities.”
I agree. That is why as an active member of my community I am at the No Kings protest. It’s why I write letters to the editor. My actions in my community combine with those in other communities to encourage a more widely spread momentum for changes that we see are necessary in our communities in particular and our country as a whole.
In support of the contention that those of us who seek change had best keep our eye only on local issues, the writer says that “Rosa Parks’ protests…were about a local bus issue.” Excuse me? Can the writer possibly be that ignorant of the deliberate part Rosa Parks played in the Civil Rights Movement? Do they really think that Parks was simply piqued because she had to sit at the rear of her local bus line? Parks was actively engaged in NAACP political activism to bring about widespread change in a racist culture. Her activism was not about “a local issue.”
The Sound Off writer identifies as working for the Washington Policy Center without identifying that their organization works within the network of conservative and libertarian think tanks (using the term think loosely if this column is representative) whose mandate is to focus on state-level policy. Does that mandate include discouraging citizens from activism in national issues? Why is the writer trying to tell us we are wasting our time protesting the awful things going on in our country right now with MAGA politicians in charge? Really, why?
If the writer is truly concerned about our community’s blood supply if these senseless protests continue, I think there’s a better way to go about it.
Betty Azar
Freeland
