brendan halpin

Saturday I went to the Tesla Takedown protest at the Prudential Center in Boston. At 56, I was one of the youngest people there, and almost everyone there was white. I don’t draw any conclusions from this—it was just interesting to me. I associate protesting with the young, but the young were mostly not in evidence.

Was it worthwhile? I mean, Tesla stock has lost a lot of value, and I think being out there reminding people that they’ll be judged negatively for lining the pockets of this Temu Bond villain who is destroying the federal government is a good thing. I did feel with this particular protest that the demographics made it easier for people to write it off as a bunch of disgruntled old hippies. (I saw a lot of familiar faces that fit that description.)

And then there’s the chanting. There’s just an inherent corniness to these things that is somehow hard for me to get past. I warmed up to it as the protest went along, but I just can’t deal with the whole “Hey Hey! Ho Ho!” family of chants.

Special shoutout to everyone who made signs, because they were caustic, brutal, clever, and in many cases, quite artistic!

The protest was well organized and extremely polite, and I think this, ultimately, was my problem with it. I am far angrier than this protest. It was good to have an outlet, and I may well do it again, but I long to be part of a crowd that frightens fascists the way that fascists want to frighten us. When I marched against a Nazi rally in Boston (in 2016, maybe?) there were so many of us that the Nazis fled well before we got to Boston Common.

This particular protest is an extremely mainstream and safe way to express your displeasure. But Tesla owners driving by weren’t intimidated; they were laughing at us. Perhaps their reaction would have been different if we’d had a thousand people there.

I had some lunch and went and stood in line for a town hall with my Representative in Congress, Ayanna Pressley. The wait was ridiculously long, though, to their credit, the staff did pull people with mobility aids out of the long line in order to assure they got seats and didn’t have to stay in line. For the rest of us, though, it was an hour in line and then an hour of waiting inside. Unlike at the Tesla Takedown, this was a multigenerational, multiracial group. It did skew older, though, which makes me wonder where the young people are. I hope they’re planning something big that they’re just not telling us olds!

And like, I know politicians are always late. But it still was frustrating, especially after we saw Representative Pressley enter the room and then it was still another half hour of local and state politicians working the room. I mean, it was okay. I had a book. But still.

Anyway, first we heard from Carol Rose from the Massachusetts ACLU, who I guess was there to remind us that we still have courts and that filing lawsuits has thus far been an okay way to at least slow things down.

Then Representative Pressley got up to speak and answer questions. She was, as always, inspiring, and it was refreshing to hear a Democratic elected official express frustration with the party that echoes my own.“We need to match their energy,” she said. “They campaign with headlines, and we campaign with slide decks.” She also criticized the party for not using every bit of power at its disposal. Lookin’ at you, Chuck Schumer, you contemptible coward!

What I noticed, though, was that a lot of the questions boiled down to “what are you going to do” and “what can we do,” and Representative Pressley was extremely vague on both counts. I don’t really blame her for this, and she did give some good tips—you don’t have do do everything, some people are going to march, some are going to make signs, some are going to make sandwiches, and everybody’s contributing in the way they can. But I note that this extremely angry crowd was hungering for someone to tell us how best to direct our anger.

I believe if she’d said, “We’re gonna need everybody to take to the streets on April 5” or whatever, people would have happily agreed. This was not a fringe, activist audience. It was a bunch of regular folks who are furious. They’re waiting for someone to direct their energy. I wish someone would step up.