The Resistance Fizzles Out in Philly

Philadelphia

On a Wednesday evening in November, several dozen police officers stand watch in front of Philadelphia’s city hall. They’re on alert—but not entirely sure what for. A young bicycle cop tells me he too had heard there would be a protest tonight at Dilworth Park, here in the heart of municipal Philly.

If fewer than 20 people show up, half the officers here will get to stand down, he believes. Per a roll call on Facebook, I tell him that more than 700 had said they would attend. “Please, God, no,” he groans. A slightly senior officer standing next to us raises his eyebrows and sneaks a look at the south side of the building, where a small gathering’s begun.

So far, at 5:55, there are three people. The generously publicized “Primal Scream Against Trump” is scheduled to start in five minutes.

“Let’s have a primal scream for the current state of our democracy! Gather together after work at Philadelphia’s City Hall,” read the viral invitation. But on the first anniversary of Election Day 2016, these few apparently are the dregs of an anti-Trump resistance.

Or was it a hoax? Maybe a ploy to distract the police while a clever bandit pulls off a heist? Mike Hisy, 54, is taken aback by the challenge to his organization’s seriousness. “I’ve been an activist over 40 years. I don’t joke,” he says. Mike’s come with the grassroots group Philly UP, a klatch of enraged progressives who found each other last year.

“We wanted to be part of the change,” says an ebullient, curly-haired woman also with Philly UP who won’t tell me her name lest her “very straight job” ever learn of her activism.

A reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer takes down Mike’s statement: “Dilworth Park, that’s where the zillions of cops are. There’s going to be a second protest. It starts at seven,” he says, deflecting from the heavily oversold Primal Scream. (For the second act, Samantha Goldman, a kindergarten teacher, leads a march of five(!) around city hall behind the hand-painted banner—Trump and Pence Must Go! Although, “It will probably take millions to drive out this regime,” she allows.)

The event page for Primal Scream, a smirking observer recalls, promised more than 700 screamers south of city hall at 6 p.m. “We were here to laugh at them! That’s why we’re here,” says a disappointed Ross Wolfe, 29. He’s standing with a handful of Philadelphia Young Republicans, who brought earplugs, expecting a mob belting helplessly at the sky. “I thought they were serious.”

“We have more of an audience than we have screamers right now. That’s messed up,” says Betsy Cutler, counting the Young Republicans and passersby waylaid by curiosity. She’s come to vent her partisan rage, unquenched by Democrats’ victories in multiple state elections the night before. Instead she’s sitting bitterly on the sidelines, even more embarrassed to join the raucous few now that they’ve started screaming without her.

“Seven-hundred people RSVP’d, but they must have thought it was a joke, because they’re not here,” she strains to talk over their screeching. Then one of them, a woman in a rainbow Philly UP trucker hat, catches her eye: Our goal here is to express our emotions—are you here to scream!?

“I am!”

Betsy leaves me, leaping at the invitation.

“We copied ours from the one at Boston Common. They got 2,500 hits in one day,” the rainbow-hatted organizer, Vashti Bandy, 38, tries to explain. “We have way more people online,” she says of Philly UP’s membership. Vashti had no idea who would actually come. “I legit thought it looked like fun. We could have got 750 people—I had no idea.”

She looks around at her three friends.

“We were a little light for the actual turn out.”

Greta Alexander, who was “sobbing uncontrollably” at this time last year, takes note of the crowd size, too. “I was hoping for a cathartic experience, and I’m disappointed at the lackluster turnout.” Greta still wears a safety pin, a common accessory in the early days of Trump-trauma to signal to allies that she’s a safe person. “It’s a little sillier than we had imagined,” she says of the evening.

Greta’s companion, Oona Jones, shakes her head. “It’s depressing,” she mutters.

Meanwhile, a young Latino man who’d been standing on the sidelines since six o’clock joins Mike, Betsy, Vashti, and the curly-haired woman for one yawp, then plunges his hands in his pockets and walks on. He too, I suspect, had hoped for more.

As had Sue Green, an elegant middle-aged mother of two, who’s come in a “Nevertheless She Persisted” t-shirt under a blue shearling coat. She wanted to turn it into a girls’ night. “I was trying to rally. I was like, Come on, ladies! I thought more women would have shown up.”

At that, Erica Salvi, whom Sue knows from her children’s progressive school, chimes in: “After yesterday’s election, people are feeling more confident.” There were much larger protests, Sue recalls, at the statue of controversial former mayor Frank Rizzo on the other side of city hall this summer.

Rizzo, a vicious racist or a beloved reformer, depending whom you ask, inflames local passions like Trump no longer can. Cops and protesters came to blows during a demonstration at the statue’s feet last week, after Mayor Jim Kenney announced his plan to relocate it to a less prominent vantage. Tonight, the statue still stands watch, daring us to imagine what Rizzo would say if he were here.

An earlier version of this article named the Temple University College Republicans, when in fact it was the Philadelphia Young Republicans who passed out earplugs.

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