Sunday morning, there was a bit of activity in Chateau Steelypips to get SteelyKid set up to play a long-neglected game on the Nintendo Switch with a classmate online. At lunch, SteelyKid mentioned in passing “Hey, [Name] says he’s going to the Black Lives Matter rally at the town hall this afternoon. Can we go?”

This was the first I’d heard of any such rally, and Google didn’t turn anything up, either. Searching just “Niskayuna” on Twitter finally turned up one photo of a flier announcing a rally to be held at the Town Hall at 2:30 that afternoon. That’s not a long walk from our house, so SteelyKid and I hoofed it over there a bit past 2.

The total lack of information about this in local papers, etc. left me not knowing what to expect, but as you can see from the photo above, they got a pretty good turnout despite only advertising via word-of-mouth (according to a colleague who’s on one of the mailing lists they used). I counted about 50 people in the immediate area where we were, and trying to estimate the number of such blocks needed to tile the lawn area where people were sitting would put the crowd at 500-ish. Essentially everyone was wearing a mask of one sort or another, and people were making some effort to maintain separation between groups.

I am not, as a general rule, a political rally person; I strongly dislike being in crowds, and I can’t turn off the part of my brain that automatically critiques the content and technique of speeches. I also prefer to keep moving around (my back starts to give me trouble if I stand in one place for too long), so I spent a lot of the rally pacing back and forth along the edge of the crowd. I suspect there were probably a few people who had me pegged as an undercover cop. (There were no visible police present, though the police station is right there, so I’m sure they had eyes on it from inside.)

While this isn’t a thing I’m going to take up doing every weekend, I’m glad we went. It was important for us to show support for the general cause of supporting communities who are too often victimized by authority (though it remains mildly appalling that such an obvious cause is at all controversial). It was also encouraging to see so much support from the general community. It was especially encouraging to see the active role of the younger generation– the organizers were high-school students, as were a lot of the attendees, and SteelyKid’s age cohort was similarly well represented. The kids, as they say, are all right.

I could quibble with some of the speeches– as noted above, I can’t turn that off– but that would be poor form given the cause and the youth of the organizers. There was a lot of passion from the speakers, and generally positive energy from the crowd, and that’s what matters. I hope that both of those can be carried forward and channeled to make meaningful change for the better, so that when SteelyKid is my age, this is no longer an issue that requires street protests.