Saturday ‘s events don’t set up anything we don’t already know. We know that FOTUS wants a military parade for his birthday because that’s what the North Korean, Chinese and Russian leaders can have any time they want. The fact that the date is also the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army is just happenstance; for him, it’s the birthday that matters. He wants to be king, in the way that no leader has reigned in the United States since England’s George III.

We know there are hundreds of protests planned for that day and time also, all of them with the theme NO KINGS. In some rural protests, maybe a hundred people might show up. In the cities, the number will be in the thousands, of all ages. At this point I am still hearing of more protests in my own area, which leads me to think the number of actual gatherings is closer to thousands than hundreds.

We have seen large protests before, filling the Mall, filling entire streets in New York City and Chicago and elsewhere. This time, however, no protesters are supposed to be in the Mall, and there may be none at all within the legal boundaries of Washington, D.C., because the military will be downtown for that one-block parade, and where they’re going to put all those tanks when they’re not promenading is beyond me.

But tomorrow we are likely to have more than 3.5% of the population in the streets protesting across the country.

This percentage matters.

According to this BBC article, “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.” They give a lot of examples.

The current US population, give or take the dozen or so who will be born before this is posted, is 341,935,950,and 3.5% of that number is 11,967,758 people or to round it off, about 12 million. I could be wrong, but I think the country is energized enough,

Change will come, and we are all part of it.