Sign o’ the times mess with your mind. Dearly beloved musician Prince reminded us of just this reality, as he educated listeners on the Zeitgeists of 1987: AIDS, gang violence, Space Shuttle explosions, bombs falling, poverty, and despair, with a glimmer of hope in the form of flying.
We asked this participant’s permission to photograph; she cheerfully agreed.
And so, gathered here (in my State Capitol) that day — Presidents’ Day (Feb. 17) 2025 — my companion (Joe), me, and about 500 strangers-in-arms raised placards and our voices for the so-called 50501 (fifty, fifty, one) protests, which have steadily been gaining steam since U.S. President Donlon Mump, er, Enald Trusk Donald Trump took office for his second term on Jan. 20, 2025. The 50501 Movement derives from the idea of “50 protests, 50 states, and 1 movement” and formally began with a peaceful nationwide protest on Feb. 5, 2025, to reject authoritarianism, Project 2025, inane government firings, and both Donald Trump and co-president Elon Musk.
First, my friend and I parked in an underground/aboveground garage attached to an Episcopal church, behind a sticker-clad hatchback with a clever bumper sticker 
advising that all Americans should “Know Your Parasites,” very similar to this one (ones like it are available via Zazzle and a half-dozen others). Before we’d gotten far, a sixty-something lady with a cane approached us to ask if we could exit at the bottom of the lot. As we chatted amiably, she saw we didn’t bring any signs. The discussion at home prior to leaving, more than an hour away from the Capitol, was, “Is it enough for us to be there or should I make a sign?” My companion wore his pro-education button proudly instead. “Would you like this one?” inquired the woman with the cane. Turns out, she came very prepared with several hand-made placards of her own. Before we’d even left the church’s grounds, we were the brand-new (if temporary) owners of a “We the people not we the rich” sign that implored us to reject oligarchy.
Variations on the Elon-felon theme were “You can’t spell ‘felon’ without Elon.”
A deserted alley led out of the parking lot, and the lady who let us borrow the sign hurried out ahead. I was a little off-footed when a young professional in a tailored suit approached us to ask what we were protesting. A brief flicker of “whadda ya got”-era Marlon Brando batted around inside my brain, but my companion Joe and I simultaneously blurted out something nondescript like “Trump policies.” We didn’t have the chance to ramble further before he, even more surprisingly, added, “Oh, anti-Elon. . .” To which we enthusiastically agreed. His smile and “right on, good for you all” matched the enthusiasm of the parking garage employees, three in number. One worker I heard say to no one in particular, “I hope [you] protest every weekend,” to which the other added, “Yeah, get them out of there,” to mean throwing the current slate of elected “bums” out of office.
My companion’s students had warned him about the police presence (“wear a mask”; at first I thought they meant to avoid the flu-RSV-COVID orgy going on), but we weren’t too worried about molotovs, tear gas, and pepper sprays. By my rough estimates, at least 70 percent of the crowd was our (“middle”) age and older. We were both disappointed, however, that it was not larger. Very few people of color participated, from our vantage point, which saddened me.
Instead, a series of speakers in desperate need of bullhorns took the stage-not-stage approximating the center of the tree-friendly park sloping downward. They spoke of dissent and peace and oligarchy for about sixty minutes. Every so often, a car would pass by and its driver honk supportively.
(Yes, you can tell an angry horn from a supportive horn.)
To sum the day — what you can’t see from these photos and brief video (go easy on me; videographer I ain’t) — we logged our objections to the current administration and then some. Joe and I signed several gubernatorial and other political petitions and just generally admired the signs. At least half of them called out Elon Musk, really eclipsing Trump (which Trump, in all his paradoxicality, likely fumes about; oh yes, the race to the bottom, to be the worst among the worst, is real).
Profanity (“F*** Mars, Save Earth”), portmanteau (like “Muskrat”), puns and other wordplay delighted the language-lover in me. The few I questioned? Sic semper tyrannis, which to me glides much too close to Confederate sympathizer and Lincoln slayer John Wilkes Booth and another that suggested deporting Elon Musk as an illegal alien. One I thought funny denounced Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, telling Mr. SpaceX that his “dogeshit” was very much not appreciated in our state.
And, on that President’s Day, the calls were for No Kings, although a king was in attendance (you can see that person in the red robe in my shot below). The king had huge Trump eyebrows and mugged for the local news cameras (which you can see here in the heading shot by RVA magazine).
King Donald, peasant’s-eye posterior view.
It felt well worth my time (and my companion had skipped work!) to spend an hour, not counting the commute, standing up for trans kids who have already lost their healthcare thanks to Trump and Virginia’s governor (whom I call Glenn Trumpkin), USAID’s efforts to save starving or unvaccinated children and people with AIDS overseas, plus civil servants, those unfairly losing Social Security or Medicaid, education, science, the environment, women, and so much more. It truly is an all-out assault by the quid-pro-quo POTUS. Joe had another zinger, referring to the “Keystone Cops” in charge of the United States now that federal workers “accidentally” purged by DOGE have been recalled to work on unimportant <sarcasm> matters like bird flu and, oh, say the nuclear arms program or the power grid in the Pacific Northwest. If I could add an eyeroll emoji here for shorthand, I would.
Whether chanting “hey, hey, ho, ho, Elon Musk has got to go” or, as you can somewhat hear in my video clip (you might need to turn it up), “Lock him/them up,” we the people of the United States have spoken. We were “singing songs and carrying signs” à la the sixties protest anthem “For What It’s Worth,” by Buffalo Springfield, a “haunting ballad” invoked so well by my magazine colleague, Christopher P. Winner, here. And if you’re in the States and so inclined, please join your fellow non-Fascists at a future exercise of the “right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government [what remains of it] for a redress of grievances” per the First Amendment to the Constitution, including the February 28 “corporate blackout” (a boycott on all purchases) and a tentative early March nationwide protest.
