Massive marches across the country

Much bigger turnout than expected.

Lots of people showed up who were not on anybody's list.

In DC, for example, city residents who stayed home yesterday walked out of their houses and apartments to join the anti-Trump crowds.

Some are the usual lefty cranks, especially including people with the megaphones.

But lots are just people freaked at Trump and his agenda.

Much as the masses who marched against the Vietnam War mostly had no sympathy with either hippie ideology or the radicalism of, say, SDS.

As it has turned out, the demonstrations are not just about women's issues, partly because so many additional people showed up that organizers didn't even arrange for, many to march about other Democratic issues like climate change and immigration and Obamacare.

These are giant Democrat rallies.

They are happening in many, many cities across America and there are sympathy rallies elsewhere in the world like Australia, New Zealand, Britain, France, and Germany.

Interesting that these popular Democratic causes seem to include, anyway for many, support for the EU and expanded NATO, and the broad collective security represented by US participation in and leadership of the global alliances built up after WW2.

Few of these folks are pro-Brexit or anti-NATO, much less anti-UN.

For all we could gather from this day, Democrats are mostly not isolationist, let's-go-it-alone America Firsters.

But would they really want America to fight Russia to defend Latvia?

At the risk of actual, massive war in Europe between NATO and Russia?

Would these Democrats accept sending American draftees by the tens or hundreds of thousands to such a war?

I don't believe it.

Would they risk an outright nuclear war for Latvia?

An odd and not very realistic suggestion, I think, in view of how they, their parents, or their grandparents felt about America fighting a purely conventional, though expensive and bloody, war to defend South Vietnam from Uncle Ho and the reds.

I opposed direct American participation in the Vietnam War with our own troops, particularly draftees, because it was a good cause not very important to the US, and far from important enough to me, personally. 

I had other priorities. 

And anyway America's official policy of containment drew our outermost defensive lines way too far out, in my opinion, all due to the ludicrous Cold War panic of American capitalists - what Jimmy Carter rightly spoke of as an excessive fear of Communism.

And I would oppose an American war against Russia to defend former territories of the Soviet Union for exactly the same reasons.

I think non-interventionism is preferable to the aggressive globalism currently, and very oddly, supported with little visible dissent by Democrats and the broader American left.

So why don't I support Trump if I agree with significant pieces of his agenda?

Well, Mussolini did make the trains run on time, as was famously said in his defense; but, hey, it was Mussolini.

Better the trains should be late. 

Images from lots of places.