Mel Packer: We Must Lay Our Bodies Down

Millions of US residents, in hundreds of locations across our nation, showed up for “No Kings” rallies on the weekend of Oct 18 and 19, 2025, to protest Trump’s gradual imposition of fascist rule. Unfortunately, those rallies continued to mostly uphold Democratic Party leaders and elected officials as those who will “lead us from the wilderness” despite repeated polls showing a continuing decline of support for that party. 

Despite the clearly and rapidly growing appearance of fascist ideals, the demonizing of marginalized groups, the militarization of police actions, the massive usurpation of the right to a “free” press, and the strong hints that Trump may impose the Insurrection Act which could indefinitely postpone elections, most of the speakers at rallies continued to behave as if it will all be fixed in the midterm elections. Somehow, a party with the anemic program and platform that again amounts to nothing more than, “We’re not Trump” is, in the hopes and dreams of the Democratic Party, expected to excite enough of the voting public to reject the Trump administration’s program and policies. 

Even David Brooks, a long time PBS commentator and New York Times columnist who describes himself as a “moderate Republican” has recently written that “Chuck Schumer will not save us.” Such a telling comment is from a recent opinion piece in which he calls for a mass movement in the streets to topple autocracy and expresses no faith that our political system offers any salvation. 

He is right and those words of praise do not come easily from me when it comes to upholding David Brooks as a prophet. 

In decades past, during the heyday of the Labor Movement and before most unions became “partners” with their oppressors, those same unions took militant action.  They organized in communities, demanded social justice for all, and used the power of working-class unity to win significant gains. They occupied factories, broke the laws, defied the courts, and paralyzed commerce with their actions of civil disobedience. 

The early architects of the Civil Rights movement also learned the power of civil disobedience and defied racist laws. The image of Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the “colored section” of a public bus was a powerful impetus to many who still believed in the power of the ballot box and prayers to defeat segregation. The images of Black college students occupying seats at segregated lunch counters while racist whites dumped food on their heads, built sympathy for desegregation efforts. Media coverage flashing around the world of peaceful unarmed marchers walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge only to be met by ferocious dogs, fire hoses blasting them, and unmerciful police beatings on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, galvanized millions of all races to stand with them. Many joined them no matter the risk involved. 

At the Democratic Party Convention of Chicago in 1968, unarmed anti-war demonstrators were brutally beaten and unlawfully arrested by Chicago police while Dan Rather, one of the most trusted TV news anchors in the US, was sucker-punched by a security guard on the convention floor. As today, the media was perceived by those in power as “the enemy.” Violence reigned in the streets for days as the Dem Party officials insisted, as they do today, on supporting an unjust war. 

Just two years later, on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen called up by a conservative governor to quell student anti-war demonstrations, fired into a crowd of unarmed, peaceful, but militant protesters killing two and wounding 9 others. 

All the above were exercising their right to free speech by using civil disobedience as a tactic, a tool, to demonstrate their power and to successfully galvanize public sympathy for their cause. 

I note the above examples because we are at a turning point in the American experience. For far too long, as the parties that allegedly represent our interests have become willing servants and tools of the wealthy, many US voters have continued doing what Albert Einstein termed “the definition of insanity”, or “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” He was right. 

With extremely rare exceptions (Rep Summer Lee of SW PA being the leading and perhaps only example) we are led to believe that we need not do anything except show up at permitted and staged mass rallies, and to stand among the masses assembled to worship at the altar of Democratic Party leaders and elected officials as they tout voting as the panacea for all our problems. Independent action that might bring arrests are firmly discouraged, the issue of a state sponsored genocide in Palestine shoved aside, and in some cases even red-baiting is used to cause division and suspicion among supporters. 

As earlier noted, the columnist David Brooks has it right. Autocracy is here, whether you call it fascism or another similar label, and it will not be defeated nor even successfully challenged until and unless we begin to once again adopt the practice of civil disobedience. 

What does that mean? It means laying our bodies on the line, it means that people should willingly defy the laws and block the streets, should be willing to go to jail, should stand with arms raised even when being roughed up by cops and refuse to fight back as the media records our actions. It means that we should conspire, yes conspire, with others of a like mind to commit to these actions in large numbers if we wish to create empathy and support. Civil disobedience is the WILLFUL REFUSAL TO OBEY OR COOPERATE with increasingly draconian dictates from both the White House and other elected leaders. 

Recent notable examples are the hundreds of arrests of Jewish Voice for Peace and UK activists as they peacefully occupied public places in the hundreds while demonstrating against the “terrorism” designation applied to Palestine Action by the UK government. 

There are those who will disagree with this position and argue that, like the seemingly well-organized militias of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other new-Nazi groups, we should arm ourselves and prepare to defend ourselves with those arms. With all due respect to those others who are also anti-fascist, at best this is a mis-reading of the military and surveillance powers of our government and at worst “macho-posturing and adventurism”. While I fully support the right to self-defense by one’s chosen means, I remain convinced that attempts to topple this state by arms is certain defeat. Such self-defense efforts are often then successfully branded as offense by the state. 

Fascism will not be defeated by a small band of armed urban guerillas who will quickly suffer military defeat by state forces. Instead, it will fail to generate mass sympathy from most residents who will shy away from support and instead decline to participate in anti-fascist actions fearing the possibility of violence. 

Mass movements are built by masses of people enraged at the behavior of the state in all its potential and present brutality. Widespread videos of ICE agents openly and publicly brutalizing protesters or those they suspect (often wrongly) of being undocumented has brought out mass support for our immigrant population by those who normally might not stand with them. 

Civil disobedience will not occur without brutality from police agents. People will be beaten, incarcerated people may be tortured, and yes, people will die. They have died at the hands of our government in every meaningful struggle for justice waged in our history. It is essential for the state to create daily terror upon the innocent in the hopes of intimidating masses of people who may then become afraid to show their opposition. 

We cannot allow this to happen. We must stand up against a tyrannical state power that is clearly moving toward fascism, or more and more of us will wake one day to find families and friends gone.  The chances to be in the streets defying the state will then be more remote and impossible than ever. 

We have a right to be afraid. But if we let fear dictate our actions, we will lose. 

It is time to remember those who have, in the past, laid their bodies down for freedom and justice. It is now our turn. It is time to lay OUR bodies down.

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Copyright 2025 Mel Packer

Mel Packer is a longtime environmental and human rights activist who lives in Pittsburgh.