The Offside Mysteries, 20th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Despite rain still in the system, I got my walk in today but only 4.7 miles, a Madison. But no complaints, most of the walk was to and from the 17th Street overpass near Atlantic Station, one of the 2000 or so No Kings protest sites across the country today. I made it back home just as the day's thunderstorms were starting to pour down in earnest.

I was proud of Atlanta's behavior at the protest today. The chanting was heartfelt and loud, the crowd was diverse in gender, race, and age, and everyone behaved peaceably. There was a very small Westboro Baptist-type group, really only about three or four people, that seemed to enjoy trolling everyone, proclaiming through bullhorns that "homosexuality is a sin" and "Atlanta is a den of iniquity." But the other protesters pretty much ignored or just laughed at them, and no one took the bait and got outraged. There was no violence.

During the 2016 Trump protests, a fairly sizable number of protesters played cat and mouse with the police, making a sport of trying to block the roads and shut down the interstate, and then running away when the cop cars came over. People today stayed on the sidewalks and let the traffic pass by, most of which honked their horns and gave thumbs up in approval and agreement. 

I saw a post on social media "warning" people that paid outside agitators were coming to the protest sites, that they were instructed to cause maximum chaos, and that pallets of bricks had already been delivered at strategic points to throw at the police. Obviously bullshit, and the crowd that I saw today behaved in such a polar opposite way that no one could take such spurious claims seriously.

But make no mistake: a LOT of people showed up, and they were all fed up with the Trump administrations, the tariffs, the deportations, the military presence, the grifting, the deadlocked, do-nothing Congress. There was no mistaking the anger and the outrage, but it didn't need to express itself with violence or vandalism. 

Pics or it didn't happen: