My views on political protest have… evolved a bit in my lifetime, and I’m sure others could say the same. When I visited DC as a kid, we saw people carrying signs so frequently that I just came to understand them as part of the scenery, like taxis in New York or kudzu in Mississippi and worth about as much consideration.

I got more progressive in high school and college, but I still was pretty tongue-in-cheek about the whole idea of carrying signs when Gisele Lagace and I started up Penny and Aggie in (jesus) 2006. Aggie, as we presented her, had causes worth fighting for but often went after them in ways guaranteed to alienate her peers.

In the 2005 inauguration, I hung out with a group of protestors for a bit but took off when it became clear they were looking to pick a fight with the police. In 2009, when GA was just gearing up, Phil and I fenced about how much weight we should throw behind Occupy Wall Street, even though economic inequality was a theme of ours from day one. “We support the same causes, but I’m not really… with them,” Syr’Nj could say here, and that was pretty much me about any angry, shouty movement on my side of the political aisle, when this page came out in 2013. As a child, I was embarrassed by a stutter and a hair-trigger temper; as an adult, I would value patient, slow, reasoned speech over such… street theater.

Then 2016 happened.

(Concluded tomorrow.)