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Deanna Bugalski 💋 asks what the next fifty years will look like.

How do you think about a half century?

If you’re in my age territory, 75, you’ve probably got images and stories that make time stand still, an illusion, of course.

Or, perhaps, not!

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That’s a bushy-haired, mustachioed, open-Oxford cloth-shirted me under the red arrow in the first photo. I’m with a group of mostly college students marching in protest, a few days after the killing of four students and the wounding of nine more by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. The Kent State students themselves were part of a resistance against President Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. (Source)

The stern-looking older fellow in the foreground looks vaguely familiar. I’ll let him stand in for my father.

This is me eight days ago before a No Kings Day march objecting to, among other things, President Trump’s ordering the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles to quell the protests against his deportation policies. (Source). Evidently, I have one uniform for public outrage.

Here’s our northeast Iowa community’s resisters marching toward the Winneshiek County Courthouse.

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Two massive nationwide demonstrations of NO to a President, fifty-five years apart. 

As our No Kings group of about 1000 strode by a Mexican restaurant — one of hundreds in this MAGA dominant Red state — five Latino employees stood in a side door smiling and applauding.

As I looked at them, I recalled James Baldwin’s lament and call to action, from a half century ago, 

The horror is that America changes all the time without ever changing at all.

The next fifty years?

Protesters age out, Presidents accumulate, and the beneficiaries of reform perennially rise to be counted. I’m guessing that over five decades, our grandchildren will again and again and again assert their right to assemble in protest and petition to extend the Constitutional rights of all citizens to weaker neighbors preyed upon by the Confederate-Legacy demagogues and their supporters, who also refuse to go away.

So it goes.