JOAN BAEZ, NO KINGS 3, AND THE END OF EXCUSES

Action is the antidote to despair. Not hope. Not the group chat. Not the extremely well-reasoned thread you just posted to an audience of people who already agree with you. Action. The kind that costs something. The kind that requires you to put down the phone, lace up your shoes, and go be a citizen in the physical world where citizenship actually happens.

Joan Baez has been doing exactly that since 1960. She marched. She got arrested. She flew to Hanoi while the bombs were still falling. She sang at the March on Washington, at Woodstock, at Occupy, at No Kings 2 in San Francisco where she walked onto a stage unannounced in front of a hundred thousand people and sang like the last sixty years had been one long rehearsal for this exact moment. She is now eighty-five years old. She has never once waited for conditions to improve. She has never once chosen the couch.

Most Americans have chosen the couch. Repeatedly. With enormous conviction and a very fast wifi connection.

Doomscrolling is a protection racket. Every horrifying headline you consume without acting on is a toll you pay to the algorithm in exchange for the feeling of engagement without the inconvenience of actually engaging. Power loves this arrangement. Power has always loved a population too exhausted and too demoralized to walk out the front door. The algorithm is doing work for authoritarianism that authoritarianism used to have to do itself. It’s very efficient. You should be furious about it. Preferably while moving.

Joan Baez never had an algorithm. She had a guitar, a principle, and a willingness to go wherever the fight was and stand there until something changed. And things did change — not because of any single march or any single song, but because enough people kept showing up, kept paying the price, until the cumulative weight of their presence became something power could no longer absorb and ignore.

Five million came for No Kings 1. Seven million for No Kings 2. Nine million on March 28th is the number that researchers of mass movements identify as the threshold where governments stop taking notes and start changing course. Let’s give this fascist administration something to calculate.

The people who will actually change things are the ones who go home afterward and join something — a mutual aid network, a union drive, a school board campaign, a neighborhood council, a group of neighbors who have decided that looking out for each other is a radical act. The people who knock on doors. Who show up to city council meetings that nobody covers. Who learn their state representative’s name and make that representative’s life genuinely interesting. Who find the local version of the fight and dig in for the long haul.

So yes. Come to St. Paul on March 28th. Stand shoulder to shoulder and watch a woman who has never once in her life chosen despair over action stand up and sing. Let it remind you what this feels like. Let it light whatever it needs to light.

And then go home and do something. Not tomorrow. Not when things get bad enough. Now. Your community is not waiting for conditions to improve. The people who need you are not waiting. The work does not wait.

Joan Baez will be in St. Paul on March 28th.

Where will you be?

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