Wendy Parker

From the moment I got an e-mail earlier this week about a rally in East Cobb against President Trump, I dreaded Saturday.

The “No Kings” events across the country coincided with a military parade in Washington Saturday night to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, Trump’s birthday and Flag Day.

Those plans were in the works before violent protests broke out in Los Angeles over immigration raids conducted by the Trump administration.

And before California U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla interrupted a press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to protest the raids, and was pushed to the floor and handcuffed by Secret Service for refusing to leave.

Along the way, East Cobb News readers were complaining that our report simply informing the community about the event was “promoting” it, and somehow proved our bias.

Given the location, I was simply trying to give a traffic heads-up to motorists in an always-congested area. It’s also a news story, which should have been fairly obvious even to low-information readers.

All week this ignorant nonsense persisted. I got this cordial, erudite e-mail from a reader on Friday:

“U have proven to be a left leaning news source. Tomorrow I will be at 120 and Johnson ferry to counter the BS rally you left, want  to protest ICE arresting rapists, pedofiles and illegals that are in our country illegally overwhelming our schools, hospitals and killing* our citizens, and I will have an American flag, a TRUMP FLAG and will be armed.”

When I woke up this morning, I heard the news about a Minnesota state legislator and her husband being shot to death at their home in what’s suspected as a political assassination.

Another lawmaker and his wife were also shot, and are recovering. The suspect is believed to have compiled a long list of elected officials and might have been making plans to go to “No Kings” events in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

As I write this, there is a manhunt underway for him.

The gunman’s motives aren’t clear, but the murdered legislator, a former Speaker of Minnesota House, recently voted for a bill to end free health care for illegal immigrants.

As I prepared to go to the rally here, I saw a social media post by U.S. Rep. Barry Loudermilk, who’s now our Congressman, noting that Saturday also was the eighth anniversary of the shooting of the House Majority Leader at a Congressional softball practice.

U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise was seriously injured and had a long recovery, but his Secret Service detail shot and killed the assailant, or more casualties would have been likely. Loudermilk, who was on the scene, was not hurt.

Reading this, however, I was more than unnerved, and weary of complaints about our coverage about an event that hadn’t happened.

A couple readers yakked at me that they had gone to the Roswell-Johnson Ferry intersection Saturday morning and didn’t see any protesters.

The same cordial, erudite reader sent this to me around 1:20 p.m.:

“There is nothing, why would you do that unless you are a left leaning, democrat run site”

If he had bothered to read the story, it said the rally was on Saturday afternoon from 2-3:30 p.m. Click the links, folks, that’s why we provide them.

I fired off this post on our Facebook page before I went over there about the need to take it easy.

This is not something I do, but we’re living in overheated times fraught with ridiculous political grandstanding and performative theater designed to curry attention (and campaign donations) but not much more.

But there was a good crowd of several hundred or so people, perhaps more than I anticipated, staving off some raindrops.

Thankfully, they were doing nothing more than holding signs and asking motorists to honk their horns. Many vehicles blasted away, with some waving at the protestors.

It was all rather uneventful, and that was a blessed relief.

Whatever you think about their political positions, and however contrived you think the “No Kings” rallies may be, they symbolized what peaceful protest should be about.

(At some point those who dislike the president are going to have to do more than protest; they don’t seem to have an alternative vision to Make America Great Again. And quite a few not only don’t know the meaning of fascism, they don’t care.)

With nearly 2,000 protests planned around the country, it’s possible some of Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies may have gotten out of hand. But in East Cobb, that wasn’t the case.

I talked to Cobb Police Maj. Brian Batterton, the Precinct 4 commander, who was standing near the Five Guys with several of his officers and patrol cars, and he said there hadn’t been any reported incidents.

He said a couple people stepped out into the roads, and there was a medical emergency that prompted an ambulance, but there wasn’t any sign of counterprotests (if you know otherwise, please let me know).

At one point, an organizer kindly asked me to step out of a shopping center exit, in keeping with orderly protocols set up for the event.

Free speech is the bedrock principle of what it means to be an American, and the right to dissent should be sacrosanct. In recent years, it has been coming under fire from all sides of the political divide.

That’s nothing new, as the late, great civil libertarian Nat Hentoff noted in his 1992 book “Free Speech For Me—But Not For Thee.”

Now he truly was cordial and erudite during a long and distinguished career, and is one of my journalistic heroes. He died shortly before Trump’s first inauguration, and I wonder what he would make of the times we’re in now.

He’s who I thought of when I wrote my Facebook post, and as I’m finishing this now.

But he’s almost forgotten today, in a troubling era of unhinged social media rants, cringeworthy behavior by elected officials and escalating political violence that is proving to be deadly.

Hentoff’s gentle voice and deep passion for the best values of America are in such short supply. I’m grateful we had a protest that embodied some of those qualities, and I hope they’ll be making a comeback very soon everywhere in this country.

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