Standing alone amid the crush of demonstrators at Pikesville’s weekend version of America’s “No Kings” rallies, Ruth Gumnitzky quietly unveiled her version of a message to President Donald Trump.
“This was for my father,” she said.
She was unwrapping an American flag.
It was handed to her years ago when her father, Harold E. Foxman, a World War II veteran, died.
Gumnitzky stood there at Old Court and Reisterstown roads on Saturday, Mar. 28, with hundreds of demonstrators all around her bearing printed signs, and baring their emotions, and the U.S. flag needed no words attached to it.
“My father fought so that we wouldn’t have to have demonstrations like this,” Gumnitzky said.
She meant the rallies going on all over the country last Saturday, a reported 3,000 of them across every state, with millions expressing the raw anger, revulsion and fears this president has provoked.
“My father was away for four years during the war,” she said. “He left when my little sister was a baby. And there was a man who came to the house one day, and my sister looked up and said, ‘Are you my daddy?’
“All those years, all that fighting. They never imagined we’d have this kind of America all these years later. A whole generation, and they thought they were doing away with …”
It was tough to pick up the rest of her words, from all the car horns honking support, and the people holding up signs and cheering the honking, and the cries of many hundreds of people packing the big intersection.
“I Need to be Able to Tell My Grandchildren I Did Not Stay Silent,” read one sign.
“Fight Back, Damn It,” said another sign, accompanied by a likeness of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Another read, “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” The line was a throwback to another era when the fighting was in Vietnam.
“I was a kid back then,” said Sara Glik, holding the sign. “I had four brothers, and I was afraid they were going off to the war. I never thought this message would still resonate today, all these years later.”
She said this as bombs continue exploding in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, including Israel. Directly across Reisterstown Road, at the Mobil station, a sign said gas was now going for $4.09 a gallon, another reflection of the military action Trump calls an “incursion” instead of a “war.”
Glancing around the big crowd, which extended along all four corners of the Pikesville intersection, Barry Steelman and Mike Anikeeff remembered a different war. They’re both Vietnam veterans.
“I never thought I’d be fighting for democracy in my own country,” said Steelman. Anikeeff nodded in agreement.
Steelman went to Vietnam after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1971. He mentioned other demonstrations he’d attended since then: for women’s rights, for abortion rights.
“But I never thought somebody would try to take away people’s right to vote,” he said.
Nothing is unimaginable now, under the impulsive, self-indulgent, cruel presidency of Donald Trump. It’s Iran in the headlines now, but maybe Trump’s late-night, independent decision to start the bombing a month ago was just his little maneuver to get the Epstein files out of people’s minds.
Or was it to get our minds off of Minneapolis and the killings of poor Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti? Or the possibility of ICE agents showing up at polling places next fall to hold down the possibility of a Democratic midterm election sweep?
And if it took war in Iran to get all these outrages out of people’s minds, what madness might this president cook up to take a limited “incursion” from our minds?
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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