A rainy morning at Hands Off! in Kingston, followed by diner brunch.

My first patriotic feeling came from an epiphany about freedom of speech and the First Amendment.

The only political view that I specifically credit to my father is respect for freedom of speech. That father-to-son education came during the Tipper Gore campaign to put warning labels on explicit music. This was around 1990.

My dad thought that these warning labels were a threat. And I, who was secretly listening to very explicit 2 Live Crew albums behind my parent’s backs, agreed.

My logical train of thought went from music to a deep respect for the rules of American society.

To have freedom of speech requires allowing people to say anything. But the only reason we even debate this is because people say things that seem very, very wrong to you.

Therefore, the core, underlying meaning of freedom is that to live together in this country we have to accept the rights of our neighbors to be wrong.

That struck me as such a pointed and powerful way to say, “live and let live.”

If we can do that, then one of the benefits we can have is that we get to live together in a united society and enjoy all the benefits of our common ground and common efforts.

This is just one example of why I love going to protests and rallies. People go to protests because they love American ideals and that inspires me because I also love American ideals.

Protests are way more than complaining. They’re sort of like the cousin to a championship parade for a sports team, just on the other end of the spectrum. Instead of celebrating winning a championship, you meet before the season to celebrate trying to win the championship. People who protest have a championship mindset because they are thinking about the winningest version of the country and are willing to do something about it.

And that’s why I was at a protest on Saturday.

There were hundreds of these events across the country that in total drew more than a million people. We went to the one in Kingston, a mid-size city in what I call upstate New York, but which upstate New Yorkers would call the Hudson Valley. These were all organized under the banner of Hands Off!

The official website is handsoff2025.com and the Medium tag is “#hands-off.”

It’s probably no surprise that I think the administration is filled with bad ideas badly executed and that these bad ideas cross beyond partisanship and are somehow even more bad by being badly executed.

Tariffs are a case study in this. 162 million Americans own stocks, which, uh, are down quite a bit now with no future payoff coming. Prices are going to go up. Exports are going to go down, which means American businesses, profits, and jobs are going to shrink. The local industry that tariffs might protect is not going to materialize because the rollout was so chaotic that no American business has enough confidence to make an investment based on them.

It’s worth finding ways to say instead of losing this hard, why don’t we instead try to win.

I took some photos of the signs and cropped out faces in case people don’t want to appear in my random weekend blog post.

Mostly I was struck by the breadth of topics, but also sometimes the absurdity. For example Canada. In what fever dream would you ask an American soldier to risk their life to win and, more difficultly, keep Canada?

Afterwards we met a friend and went for coffee and variations of Eggs Benedict at a diner around the corner. It was a good way to protest.