No Kings, Saint Paul, in Mourning

I heard something was going on in Brooklyn Park right away when I got up at 6:00 a.m., but it was one thing on BlueSky and it could have been a rumor so I didn't repeat it. I did my usual stuff for the next hour or two, not looking at social media, and by then it was confirmed that two of our legislators had been shot in their homes in the northwest suburbs. 

By 10:00 a.m. we knew Melissa Hortman and her husband were dead, and John Hoffman and his wife were severely wounded and out of surgery. That their adult daughters had been in the homes, one of them protected by her mother's body from being shot. That the shooter pretended to be a cop, had exchanged gunfire with police at the Hortmans' home, and had fled out the back door on foot, leaving behind a fake cop car.

I left for the No Kings march at the State Capitol a bit before 11:00, along with Daughter Number Three-Point-One, who picked me up. She lives within walking distance of the march. Just before we left her house, reports came out that the governor and state public safety officials were calling on people to not attend the march.

Fuck that.

50501 estimates 80,000 people were there, and I would say: at least. It seemed as large or larger than the 2017 Women's March, which is generally agreed to have been 100,000 people.

Before the march started, we were in a parking lot at St. Paul College:

The march started off slowly, which is not surprising. My goal was to find the Brass Solidarity band and join up with them to bang on my coffee can. It didn't take long to find them, since they're loud and joyous.

As we rounded the corner for the wide street and the Capitol came into sight, I took a minute to take a photo of the crowd ahead of me:

Later, after we had arrived at the Capitol, I got up a bit higher than the lowest parts of the lawn to see if I could give some idea of how many people were. There are drone shots that are better at showing the scale:

Belated additions, some drone shots of part of the march looking down the street toward the Cathedral, and of the Capitol lawn:

I didn't take a lot of sign photos because I was busy playing with the band, but I did get a few:

This woman created an entire "food on a stick" server tray, and labeled the heads of a bunch of Trump's cabinet members in appropriate ways. She also made a chicken backpack of Trump:

This person modified the sign they had meant to bring to mark our murdered House minority leader:

I recommend playing music at every march, by the way.