Thousands of people were in the downtown park where it was held. The numbers are hard to estimate. For one thing, the police had pretty effectively cordoned and blocked off different areas, so there were several “blocs” of protesters (and getting from one to another took some planning and effort). Also, because of the intense heat and humidity, people were entering and leaving pretty much continuously. Trumpites were kept in a separate area and had an underground entrance to the [convention hall], and there was not much interaction between the two sides. There was at least one incident that I didn’t witness myself, but there is a video of a group of women confronting, taking a bullhorn from, and pushing away a belligerent NRA pig.

The crowd was probably three-quarters white, middle class. The largest age group was probably 30 to 40 years old, but there were significant numbers of young people, college and high school youth. Quite a few families seemed to have come together, a few told me it was the first protest for any of them. There were clearly many teachers, and a fairly significant component of medical professionals.

I saw no other groups with literature, banners, etc. There were 30 or so people, clergy and others, who tried to march to the front of the arena with an interfaith protest but were stopped by the police fairly quickly.

Our Goals

We had a small crew. We went with 2,000 leaflets (all English), and about 600 of the Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) leaflets, and I had handful of other lit. (I didn’t want us to be burdened down by schlepping a large amount of material, given the logistical challenges, and the heat.) Our major goal was to get out the Buffalo/Uvalde statement as widely as we could, and engage people around that when and to the extent possible, but mainly to get it to them.

We got out all but about 50 or so leaflets, which were kept in reserve in case something broke out late. I think pretty much all the RU4AR leaflets were distributed…

I had the “Revolution—Nothing Less!” banner, which was pretty prominent in the “scrum,” and a picture of which is now on the Revolution site. There were a lot of homemade posters, many of them creative, denouncing various Republicans, but some also pointing, even if sometimes vaguely, to a problem with America, its values, morals, ethics, and especially its “gun culture.” I’d say horror, disgust, and anger at not only the pervasive violence within this society, especially as it’s manifested in gun violence, but also at the people they see as perpetrating it (NRA, Trump, Cruz, etc.), was the dominant sentiment. People there truly despise the fascists.

The Leaflet

We got a very good response to the leaflet. The title of it was the basis of the agitation on which I took it out. Many, many people resonated to the “Insanity They Call America” point right off the bat. Several had quite a bit to say about that, adding their own personal experience, or their understanding of some of the history of this country. (Two things I’d add about that—their understanding mainly centered on things in this country—slavery, Jim Crow, police violence, etc., and I often brought out the importance of the American Crime series on the website and the global crimes of this country—for instance the My Lai massacre, which younger people hadn’t heard of; and a few people brought out how they’ve learned more about this country’s history in the past few years than they had in the rest of their lives.)

Very few people (among the ones I spoke to anyway) had any problems with the leaflet’s third paragraph. And it did give them pause to think more deeply about the questions posed in it. A couple of times Black people spontaneously told me stories of their own relatives who had been murdered by police, and then the murder was covered up, swept away, etc. No one I read this to had any problem with the sentence “There is a rot at the heart of this society that needs to be excavated and confronted in order to really solve this,” and a few times people circled back to me to talk about it—saying is it “really that bad, what can be done about it, I feel so helpless, etc.”

That America is “splitting in two” was readily acknowledged by basically everyone; that there is a “possibility of a different society” wasn’t. In general, people thought the problem is gun-loving Republicans in thrall to Trump and the NRA. I pointed out the contact info with everyone I spoke to and encouraged them to go to the site, watch The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on YouTube, etc. Hopefully some will do that, or already have. If we had more people and been more together, we could have promoted The RNL Show in particular more aggressively, and need to figure this out better for future endeavors.

Even with all the emphasis on voting, and the fact that this was basically the “default position” about what could be done for just about everyone, no one really dug in on it when I read or raised the point from the article about “… the possibility of revolution,” and working towards that. Something that really struck me through all this was the importance of the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian, of wielding it consistently, bringing it to people’s attention—the real possibility of a different way of living. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture, but I do think the overall impact of the leaflet is to lift people’s sights, to stimulate some thinking about why things are the way they are, and if something else is possible. It all reminded me of the truth of something I think Ardea Skybreak said, about the importance of asking the right questions.

I met three people, all young white guys, who were attracted to communism. Two of them were the kind of young person who goes to a library to get a copy of The Communist Manifesto, and looks up Zizek videos on YouTube. They both are at one or another University of Houston campus, I think. They seemed pretty happy to see this leaflet.

The other was a guy who came back to talk to me about half an hour after we had finished some brief initial discussion, in which he had asked whether autonomous self-sufficient entities could be built, or did the whole state really need to be overturned. It turned out that this guy (who was probably in his mid- to late 20s) had spent several years “living in the street,” as he said, and had a difficult time when many of the people he was in the middle of and who were in the same scuffle as him became “reactionary,” as he put it. When I asked him what he meant by it, he said, “They started going all MAGA on me, I had to get out of there.” He asked me if I really thought that overthrowing the state could happen. We got into that, I told him briefly about Bob Avakian (BA) and the new communism, and I hope to get back with him and the other two in the forthcoming days.

I read out the BA quote at the end of the leaflet several times, especially to young people. It always gave people pause to think—is this going to be just an endless cycle of horrible violence? What will it take to truly stop it? Also, one thing that was beginning to come out during this event was exposure of the actual response of the police in Uvalde—the contemptible cowardice, but also, I think some people are beginning to question the role of the police in general. A few people said to me things along the lines of, “Isn’t that (sacrificing yourself to disarm someone threatening children) in their job description?”

One final point is that there was very little sectarian bullshit, or dissing the leaflet for being revolutionary... only a handful of such responses, which I think says something about the intensity of the situation and how people are seeking answers, and also the fact that most of the people seemed relatively new to this kind of thing (protest).

RiseUp4AbortionRights Leaflet

In addition to the leaflets, we got out quite a few stickers and bandanas, and although I’m not sure of the number, it was evident it could have been a lot more if we had the capacity to do it. One person in our crew who focused a bit more on this said, “People really wanted the stickers—all kinds of people. The ‘Forced Motherhood = Female Enslavement’ were being grabbed up… I was aware of the thinking that says the word ‘enslavement’ is exaggeration, but didn’t run into opposition to it here. I was curious what attracted people to it. So later when a woman came up asking for stickers, I showed her that one and told her that the word ‘enslavement’ has been controversial. Immediately, seemingly incredulous that anyone would disagree, she was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? They want to breed us like we're cattle!’ I met one person who was adamantly anti-abortion, and thought that was ‘of a piece’ with her anguish at the murders of the Uvalde children.”

Several people said they would register for Sunday’s RU4AR Zoom. A white man in his 60s said that he drove six hours to be here (part of the draw was to see Beto O’Rourke) and was excited to meet up with people fighting for abortion. He was disturbed that so few people are actually fighting the possible end of Roe, and took a stack of flyers and said he would pass them out, and whatever he had left he would get out when he got home (in West Texas). He also said that he was going to post it on several social media platforms. He told someone in our crew, more than once, that he was looking forward to the Zoom call on Sunday.

A very broad sentiment, reflected in many homemade posters as well as what people said, was that these people (Abbott, Cruz, Trump, etc.) say they cherish life, but in reality they don’t give a shit about children or women. The passage in the Buffalo/Uvalde leaflet, “What is the connection between this violence and the violence done every day to women in ten million ways in this society, and to the move right now to strip women of control over their own reproduction by outlawing abortion?” hit home to quite a few people.