HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania—Charlie Gerow has lived and worked in Pennsylvania’s state capitol for a very long time. “I’ve seen a lot of rallies and protests over the decades, and generally they’re relatively small.” On Monday, when he walked up to the state capitol steps to observe the demonstration, urging Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, to reopen the economy, Gerow was blown away at the number of people in attendance.
For a man who has long given up on being blown away by anything in politics, that says a lot.
“The parade of cars alone was unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed, and quite frankly, very impressive. That line went as far as the eye could see in both directions, and many of those cars had four of five people in them,” he said of the hundreds of cars from around the state that came down 2nd Street and looped around to show support for the demonstrators who were on the state capitol steps. “I don’t know how you’d possibly calculate the number of people in that parade, but it was big.”
There were also, by several media accounts, hundreds more people outside on the steps. Some wore masks and kept a safe distance from other people, some were not. There were several pro-Trump attendees, but he was not the center of the debate by a long stretch.
“The center of the demonstration was the return of the dignity of work,” Gerow says flatly.
Gerow, who is a Republican media consultant, is irked at the mockery online of the attendees. “Pennsyltucky” trended on Twitter, an alleged derogatory description of people who are from the more rural stretches of the state and not the urban centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
“Well, first of all, there were plenty of people from suburban Philly and Pittsburgh at this event, so to try to pin on people you consider part of the ‘deplorable’ or ‘bitter-clinger’ crowd is a joke,” Gerow said, referencing derogatory terms used by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama when they were running for president.
“I think it’s a grossly unfair categorization, because I can tell you that the folks that I was standing with were all highly educated, professional people, at least one of them a Harvard grad,” he said of the friends he attended with that also included someone who made the three-plus hour drive from Pittsburgh.
“Those rural hills and valleys and small towns are made up of the places where our agriculture is grown and produced, but it is also where people from here and people who come to visit here hunt, and hike and camp and fish. So I don’t think they accomplished the insult they so cleverly thought they were accomplishing by using the word ‘Pennsyltucky,’” said Gerow.
“They all stressed they just wanted to work. And the one guy was carrying a sign that simply said, ‘I need a haircut,’ and we all thought that was pretty funny because we all certainly are in that boat,” he said of everyone’s rather shaggy appearance. “There was a woman standing there with us, and she said, ‘I’m a stylist, and I’m out of work.’ She said, ‘I would do anything to be cutting his hair right now.'”
Gerow said his one friend offered her a rather large sum of money to cut his hair right there on the spot, and she laughed, “And I offered her less than he did, but still a large sum of money to cut mine, and she said, ‘I’d take 10 bucks.’”
On the day of the Pennsylvania protest, Meghan McCain, co-host of The View, said that while she was split on the protesters, that doesn’t mean there should not be empathy as they struggle with either a loss of a job, or a family member losing their job, or their community collapsing in a domino effect because of everything being closed. “There are a lot of people in this country who are in pain, who are out of work, who are losing their homes, and I think that when people are scared and are in pain, they start to panic,” McCain said.
It makes you wonder how many of the online critics of the protesters do so from their homes, still gainfully employed, and not having to worry about how they are going to feed their families.
“Every day that our economy remains closed, we’re doing enormous damage to workers, to families and to small business owners,” said Sen. Pat Toomey in an interview with the Washington Examiner from his home about the demonstration. “Some of the damage is going to end up being irreversible,” Toomey stressed, adding that Pennsylvania needs a solid rollout plan.
“We need to get back to work as soon as we can do so safely,” Toomey said. “And for many businesses, that’s possible today,” he said of rural counties.
The people at the event were polite, they were demonstrative, but they clearly were sending the message that they wanted to get back to work and that they want the state to get back to work.
“It’s really that fundamental thing, that dignity of work. When you take that away from someone, that strips them of so many layers of who they are,” said Gerow. “All work has dignity, and without that dignity, people really feel like they’ve lost much more than a paycheck.”
On the same day of the protest, Wolf announced the statewide stay-at-home order issued on April 1 would be extended until May 8.
