No Kings, No Fascism
Published 10:30 am Tuesday, November 18, 2025
My daughter Genevieve and I had agreed to meet at the stop sign in downtown Vashon.
As I drove south toward town, I spotted a solitary figure in a bright green frog costume walking along the otherwise deserted Vashon Highway. I took it as a sign that Vashon’s demonstration would be well attended. I squeezed into a parking spot on the road east of Thriftway, retrieved my sign from the back seat, put on my gloves and headed to the corner.
My granddaughter Ava had printed my sign, “No Kings, No Fascists, No Criminals,” and on the reverse, “Impeach Trump.” I had been thinking about fascism when I designed the sign last night. Both my father and my husband Bill’s father had fought fascists in World War II. My mother had left my tiny sister with my grandmother and taken a bus to Akron’s Goodyear Aircraft every afternoon to weld B-52 bombers, as a Rosie the Riveter. Now the U.S. president had decided that antifa, anti-fascism, was an enemy organization.
I had dressed warmly for this cold, cloudy October day: thermal underwear top and pants, heavy thrifted navy cashmere sweater, wool socks and Gore-Tex rain parka. I found a spot where I could lean against the glass wall of Ruby Brink’s Restaurant.
The atmosphere was festive; I was surrounded by demonstrators dressed in inflatable animal costumes, some carrying handmade signs and others drumming on plastic buckets. A stream of old friends and acquaintances walked in front of me, many with signs expressing their love of country and their outrage at the attempted destruction of democracy.
A young man approached and asked if he could bring me a coat from somewhere. I explained that I was not cold but had a tremor. He pinned a No Kings button on my scarf; another young man added one of his sign’s hundreds of Post-it notes hand-drawn with frogs. I felt surrounded by unity and encouragement. The man standing next to me estimated our crowd size at 1,000 — an amazing percentage of Vashon’s 11,000 population.
My daughter Genny arrived wearing a crab hat and carrying two pink and purple stuffed squid, in sync with the crowd of colorful frogs, chickens and sea creatures. We crossed the street and walked the periphery of the demonstration. As we rested on a stone bench near the pharmacy, I noticed a man on the opposite side of the street aiming a wide-angle lens camera directly at me and my sign. It crossed my mind that he might represent government surveillance. I had never in my previous life entertained such a suspicion.
We kept walking and I passed a young woman wearing a sweatshirt which I read aloud as “Hillbillies don’t need electricity.” She corrected me by reading, “Hillbillies don’t need elegies,” and we laughed. I told her I had grown up in Ohio and my mom’s side of the family were from West Virginia. She was from North Carolina and now lived on Maury Island. We both detested J.D. Vance and his book. We agreed that none of the hillbillies we knew resembled any of the characters in the book.
The demonstration broke up shortly before 3 p.m. I was cold, tired and proud that we had stood up for our beliefs. Later that night, I viewed photos of more than 7 million Americans who had joined demonstrations for democracy all across our country. Together, the people are changing history.
In the following days, many of us were thinking about fascism. I heard a young woman on YouTube sing “Call Me Antifa,” a beautiful ballad that began, “My granddad fought the fascists halfway round the world. He came home scarred but grateful, for the flag still unfurled. He said freedom isn’t easy. It’s a promise, not a crown. It’s the courage to stand up, when others bow down. Call me antifa.”
I thought of Leonard Neidinger, Genny’s husband’s father. I remembered him sitting at dinner in our backyard on Vashon a few days before Genny and Harold’s wedding. Leonard looked at our garden and said, “You know, you are living in heaven here.”
Later that evening, he told us that on June 6, 1944, he had stormed the beach in Normandy as a very young man during World War II. He described running up the steep cliffs amid German machine gun fire and later being enthusiastically welcomed by the French population whom they had liberated from Hitler. He said our daughter Genevieve reminded him of the girls in France, because of her name and her fluency in French, gained during her junior year in Paris.
I copied the song, “Call Me Antifa,” and texted it to my grandchildren with the message, “For Leo, Ava and your Grandpa Neidinger.”
Lynne Ameling has lived on Vashon Island since 1976. She is a writer, a member of the Vashon memoir group and a retired educator with 36 years of experience.
