Copyright Anchorage Daily News
I joined thousands of Alaskans and millions of Americans nationwide Oct. 18 to protest the Trump administration. I wore my “No Kings” button, but I also pinned on another button discovered a few months ago in a box of college mementos — a dove on a blue background framed by the phrase “Work for Peace - October 15.” I suspect most of the crowd I joined in Town Square in Anchorage had no idea of the significance of that blue button. I also suspect there were some in the crowd who did. There is a lifetime between those buttons, 56 years almost to the day. It was 1969. I was an 18-year-old, barely a month into my freshman year of college, when the call went out for a nationwide protest on Oct. 15 to end the war in Vietnam. Protests against that war were nothing new by 1969, but most of them were on college campuses. The call for the October event was different. It was a call nationwide for people across the country to take time out on the same day to gather, to march, to reflect and to peacefully urge an end to the war. Despite the efforts of the Nixon administration to demonize the protest as a conspiracy of the radical left, hippies, communists and even paid agitators, millions of Americans from all walks of life turned out that day — the largest single day of peaceful demonstrations across the country up to that time. President Nixon asserted the moratorium would not affect him, but he was clearly disturbed. Two weeks later he addressed the nation claiming the existence of a “silent majority” that supported the war. While it was certainly true the nation was still divided, it was equally true something happened on that October day — the momentum began to shift and the tolerance of the country for continuing the war was wearing thin. Within a few years of that October 1969 moratorium, the Vietnam War ended and a president who would be king resigned. Historians may debate the causes for those two events, but most would likely agree that the large, peaceful and nationwide protests of those times were a significant factor. Most of us who marched peacefully back in the 1960s and ’70s did so believing the country still had the capability to do the right thing — that change for good was possible under our system of government. We now join our children and grandchildren not just to protest bad policies, but to defeat the current president’s efforts to undermine our system of government. So, even if the recent No Kings rally fell short of the 3.5% of the population mentioned in my sister Kate’s commentary (Why we must rise again — and bigger — to protest peacefully) so did the October 1969 event. But like that event, so many Americans participated in the No Kings rally that it may now be the largest single day of nationwide peaceful protest in our country’s history. Our elected officials should take notice. Something happened on Oct. 18, 2025. The momentum is shifting. Millions of Americans will no longer tolerate the shameful shenanigans inflicted by President Trump on our current politics. And that number is growing. Tim Troll lives in Anchorage
