Decorah No Kings, Saturday, October 18, 2025.
Crowd numbers: At least 1,000, estimated. The courthouse lawn was full.
Weather: Warm, clear blue sky, golden October light.
Signs: Cleanup on Aisle 47!
No Kings or Drama Queens (with pouting Trump in 18th-c. wig)
No King but King Jesus
(on a stroller) I’m One Year Old and I’m Already Done With This
I have RBF: Resisting B**** Face!
The People are the 4th Branch
(Below a photo of Prince): This is the Only Royalty I Need
(Arrow pointing to Trump caricature) Does This Ass Make My Country Look Small?
No Crown for the Clown
Nobody Paid Me to Be Here – I Despise What He Stands For For Free
Disobey (with drawing of a corgi scratching its ear)
We Overthrew One King – We Can Do It Again
Trump is the Worst President Since….Trump (carried by a man who stood when veterans were asked to stand)
We’re Not Radical, We Just Remember History
No Oligarchs No Kings
Average age: About mine (early 50s). Many were white-headed. Some toddlers were there. Several dynamic and talented late-20s-ish speakers were on the flatbed truck that served as a stage. All along the front row, elderly people in chairs with canes and walkers sat holding signs. They had taken some care to get here.
Energy: Joyous, loving, concerned, protective. Peaceful. Patriotic. Glad to be in community together.
Number of frog costumes: one, lowered to reveal Tshirt that said NAVY VETERAN.
Number of dinosaur costumes: one.
Number of veterans: Many.
Number of clergy: at least 3 in my vicinity.
Number of American flags: I lost count.
Quintessentially Decorah moments: Organizer positioning the crowd for a group shot, advising the holders of individual NO KINGS letters from the stage: “Your O is sideways… we need an I… ‘Does This Ass Make My Country Look Small,’ can you please lower your sign?”
On one side of me, a lady who’d been in my community writing class. On the other side, a lady who said, “Oh, you teach at Luther? I live in the house that one of your colleagues used to have, the retired physics professor….” On the steps, a man who’d been active with me in Winneshiek County Protectors, our anti-frac-sand-mining movement back in the day. All around me, smiling faces, fellow churchgoers and colleagues and community members I’d also seen at the big interfaith march in Postville, Iowa, just down the road in 2008, when ICE descended and arrested nearly 300 people in one day. I reckon I knew about half the people in this crowd, maybe more. And I realized: gosh, I really have been here for twenty years. This really is my community.
Sitting behind me, a husband and wife, farmers and peace activists, who have given me great advice about maintaining my fruit trees in the past. Instead of a sign, she was holding a bouquet of wildflowers and zinnias, carefully wrapped in wet paper towels and a plastic bag.
Organizer standing on the flatbed truck at the start of event saying, “The restrooms are in the courthouse…and in the Methodist church up the hill…” Suddenly people started pointing at the sky and everyone turned to look. Two bald eagles circled over our heads, around and around. For a full minute, the crowd applauded and cheered, until the eagles drifted out of sight.
“What are we called to do?” asked a speaker. “Love one another!” someone called back.
Negativity: House Speaker Mike Johnson, still presiding over Trump’s ongoing government shutdown, referred to No Kings protests as “hate America” protests.
Donald Trump released an AI-generated video of himself flying over a No Kings crowd in a jet with “King Trump” on the side, releasing a flood of brown liquid onto our heads.
The New York Times placed national No Kings gatherings second or third on the front page, behind the story of Trump repatriating survivors of his attack on suspected “drug vessels” (military action conducted without congressional approval). Nevertheless, in the comments section, people weighed in joyfully from all over the country, describing renewed hope and resolve and giving thanks for each others’ presence. There were a lot of us out today. Everywhere.
When asked for a comment on No Kings, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “Who cares?
The Epstein file remains unreleased, even as Prince Andrew has now resigned his title as Duke of York. Johnson continues to delay the swearing-in of duly elected Rep. Adelita Grijalva, who could be the final vote needed to force release of those files.
An elderly bald man (the only ‘counterprotester’ I saw) drove by in an expensive SUV, mouthing something I couldn’t decipher. Later I learned it was “We don’t want you people here.” I’d never seen him before. Nobody around me knew who he was either.
Stories: In the line at the restroom, I talked with a woman originally from Chicago. Like me, she is worried about ICE picking fights on their streets and about Trump’s stated intent to use American cities as “training grounds” for the military and the expulsion of journalists from the Pentagon and the undermining of American universities, the best in the world. She is also worried about her disabled son’s Medicare. She described speaking that morning to a woman in her 80s who said, fearfully, “oh, you must be those ‘hate America’ protesters – I saw you on the news.”
Wearing a shirt patterned with an American flag, Iowa State Representative Ross Wilburn spoke from the stage about his great-great-great grandfather, who escaped from slavery in Palmyra, Missouri in 1864 and joined the Union Army, via which he found himself present in Texas when the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, which means he was present at the first Juneteenth. After the event, I approached Rep. Wilburn to thank him. Only up close could I see he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
Tears: Eagles circling (see above.)
The Preamble to the Constitution, first recited as words and then briefly sung in its 1975 “Schoolhouse Rock” incarnation (which shifted tears to laughter).
End of event: all stood and linked hands to listen to Ray Charles’ classic version of “America the Beautiful.” I held the small hands of the ladies on either side of me. At the first notes, I came apart. I cried. I prayed. A republic. If you can keep it. 250 years. Will we make it? How many beautiful things are we losing. Every day. And why?
Philosophy: Frantz Fanon says that you can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand.
George Orwell says that without common understanding of a shared reality, we have nothing: “Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4. From this, all else follows.”
Hannah Arendt says that to be together in public, for a political purpose, is to hold a space open for action, which she defines as the capacity to understand ourselves as citizens, with responsibilities to uphold the conditions of our citizenship and freedom, and to act accordingly. To merely retreat into our homes is to cede the public space and our capacity for action to those who do not wish us well.
The First Amendment to the Constitution says that the right of the people to assemble peaceably shall not be abridged.
Timothy Snyder says that to start treating lies as normal is to start ceding your country to tyrants.
Public health doctor Paul Farmer says that the idea that some lives matter less than others is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.
The root of all evil: The love of money.
What I can do: As a teaching writer, I can hold a space for the good, to keep it alive, within each human heart.
In university budgets and personal schedules and democracies, what you do not hold a space for – what you put on “pause” or tell yourself you’ll get back to later – tends to go away and not come back. “Use it or lose it” is true of everything. What you do not regularly experience, keeping alive the memory of and capacity for and feelings about – with history, with Arendtian action, with collective memory – tends to go away too, from your own life and public life. And when you wake up and look for it, sometimes it is too late to reignite that capacity. Sometimes those resources have been lost, or sold. Sometimes for good.
And this is all the more true if you are currently under 30 and have literally never known much of what was considered “normal” a generation ago, what still remains in my GenX brain as a baseline to which we might hope to return. Technology has taken away more of those norms than we know – especially from the world that is all people under 30 have ever known. It is taking away capacities for acting in, knowing about, caring about, and remembering the world beyond your own head.
By now, technology is, I think, the greatest threat to our common good. We live in a world of experience and consciousness interpenetrated at all times by screen-driven technologies engineered to addict us to them so our personal data can be harvested and sold for advertising and AI “training” to further enrich the four richest men on earth while we just get poor. Even as it decimates our climate and our actual economic opportunities on the ground, most people know little to nothing about how it actually works. Despite the internet’s promises of “connection” and “information” I remember from about 1999, the world in general feels dumber – more credulous, angry, and fearful, less informed about and able to act in shared reality because we have less sense than ever of what reality is. Algorithms are engineered to capitalize and magnify our worst human impulses. Fear and anger drive user engagement. Social media becomes a disinformation ground where foreign bots roam freely. Print consumption plummets as reading becomes too hard. “Brain rot” is the word of the year, every year. Anxiety spikes. ChatGPT literally drives kids to suicide. Yet this is what we’re addicted to. This is what we are asked to accept as normal. And for GenZ, it more or less is.
Students in my first-year college classroom right now were born around 2007. This means they have never known a social-media-less world, or a K-12 public education system not shaped by “teaching to the test.” Accordingly, they lack meaningful cognitive experience consuming information through print, even if they come from “good homes” (since parents at all socioeconomic levels also became screen-addicted around this time.) Their understanding of politics and public life has been dominated by our current president (since 2015), by school shootings, and by COVID, which taught them that all to seek comfort alone in their rooms with virtual algorithmically tailored “friends.” (Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation describes this well.) Therefore, they must be offered experiences of (and in some cases actively taught how to experience) quintessentially human textures of consciousness, cognition, and action that used to be “normal” to help them build those capacities. Because otherwise those aspects of humanity will disappear.
Small things matter. In class, I ask: silence and put away your phones and smartwatches (and laptops, unless permitted) as soon as you enter the classroom, even before I arrive. Talk to the people around you. Read the text in front of you, in print, and write notes by hand. (This is hard; so is reading handwriting for students now, especially cursive.) Every year the slope up which I roll this Sisyphean rock gets steeper. I have to think more and more carefully about how to position challenges and provide on-ramps. (So does every college professor, everywhere.) But I do see results: deeper engagement, wonder at the sounds and beauty of words and images, conversation and laughter among those who were silent. And especially after students’ first year, I am also starting to see real skepticism about AI, and rich thinking and hunger to learn about what it is taking away. “You’re the first person to talk about this to me,” they say. “I feel like I am waking up.”
What can I do? I can help students see:
here’s how to keep alive your capacity to experience and think about reality in the shared world.
Here are the ways technology is literally designed to addict you and make you sad.
Here’s why it will always matter to be able to pick up a print book and tell what it says.
Lose that ability and we lose the freedom to say 2+2 = 4. And then we lose everything.
Prescient poem: “England in 1819” (c. 1819) by Percy Bysshe Shelley