In a democracy there is only one form of governance that is acceptable: . . . of, by, and for the people. Corrupt authoritarianism is not that. Another No Kings Day, on Saturday, October 17, 2026, is an opportunity for all of us to vote with our feet, vote with our chants, vote with our signs, vote with our songs. The opportunity to vote in the streets before the mid-term voting booths. Voting in the street cannot be rigged. It’s time for a show of mass solidarity. A time for the single voice proclaiming the dignity of diversity and the responsibility of equality. This single voice is not in opposition to one despicable man. Trump is the result of years of money and power having run amok, having hollowed out the living body of democracy and replaced it with a self-serving apparatus of predation on the common good. No Kings Day should be a joyous warning—the joy of the people speaking together, the warning of defiance to corruption.
I think of this country as an enormous runaway locomotive; big money and privilege have diverted the track and the entire cargo of the train for their own benefit. And we’re running out of time to get control before the disasters of climate change and wealth disparity derail us entirely. No Kings Day is not about one political party or another; it’s about having a party for the hope of humanity.
When I wrote those words “hope for humanity,” I thought of another place where hope came to me recently. It came from an English woman and her relationship with a brown hare. Chloe Dalton was a young, ambitious political analyst forced by COVID to curtail her hectic lifestyle and retreat to an old, remodeled stone barn in the English countryside. On a walk she discovers an abandoned baby brown hare. Realizing that it will very likely be quickly consumed by one predator or another, she adopts it. What’s so important about her story (beautifully told in her book Raising Hare), is that Chloe does not try to tame, name or domesticate the hare. She offers initial food and protection, letting the hare use her house as a home base for venturing back into the wild. Chloe does not posit herself as the superior species—quite the opposite! She accepts the hare as her teacher, about the laws and nuances and rhythms of nature. She adopts the hare’s sense of time and evolutionary understanding. She sees how her former political and economic life were destroying the hare’s world and, ultimately, hers, too. There is no religiosity to Chloe’s story whatsoever, but I had the strangest feeling that Chloe’s rescue of the hare, her care for it, and then becoming its student was a peculiar kind of second coming metaphor. When Chloe, the former political operative, pays close attention, the hare becomes her prophet for making peace with the world.
I juxtapose Chloe’s hare to No Kings Day for a reason. As we demand good democratic governance—as we must—we must also recognize that we will not survive on this planet unless we reorganize, or recollect, our relationship with Nature and its systems. Every plant and animal species is trying to teach us that.
No Kings Day!
No Human Superiority Day!