No Surrender
No Soldiers in the Streets, No Kings in This Land
For all the military violence there has been in the world during my life, my tactic for surviving it has taken me next to no effort: not being there at the time. By largely luck, I have not yet been very close to violent military action.
Now, for the first time, me and my fellow Americans face the specter of being in our homes, work or anywhere else in the towns we live, and being at the receiving end of the most lethal, well trained and well resourced fighting force on earth: the United States Armed Forces.
The president said he wants to use American cities as training grounds for the country’s soldiers, sailors and flyers. This country is taught as having started when a group of men, mainly farmers with their personal rifles, stood in fields in Lexington and Concord and faced one of the mightiest empire’s soldiers.
Two and half centuries of tradition, tactics and training later, and the powerful empire is now us, or at least our government.
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The U.S. Marines have deployed against unarmed U.S. citizens at home in Los Angeles. Texas Guardsmen (state militia) have for the first time since the Civil War entered a state without its permission (Illinois) and National Guard from various states have entered the capital city, which no one has hostilely entered since the British burned parts of it down in the War of 1812.
Tomorrow, about two-thousand six-hundred (~2,600) protests plan to peacefully show the world, the administration and themselves that the United States remains a nation predicated on having No Kings.
Can the president come down hard on these protests with the military? He already tried to schedule a parade missile launch on the West Coast during the No Kings protests and it only got modified, away from a U.S. Navy ship firing toward shore to instead be Howitzers firing, after the hassle of closing the major freeway Interstate 5, which the ship fired ordnance would fly over, proved to be too annoying and politically untenable.
Theoretically, potus could shell protests. He could order aerial bombardment on the protests, but even with two of the world’s largest air forces at his command (the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Navy including Marine Corps aviation), hitting 2,600 targets in multiple times zones would spread them very thin. He could roll tanks or Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) filled with infantry into the streets.
He can dispatch his secret police, the unmarked masked ice that already have been snatching people from the streets and trafficking them to typically unknown locations, and they’ve already been firing chemical and conventional weapons on the American People as well.
He can do as he has been doing: hurt and destroy.
And can accomplish nothing productive for himself in the process. Nor for anyone else.
Killing, maiming or hurting someone dancing in an inflatable frog costume doesn’t make you powerful. Firing a pepper ball into the head of a pastor doesn’t make you strong. Hiding in a fortified White House while your people chant and sing by the millions how they don’t like you, what you’re doing and why, doesn’t make you beloved.
It shows how weak, frightened and insecure you are. Like an almost octogenarian child breaking things because he doesn’t know how to do anything else.
Surrounded by greedy sycophants and fools, this president fantasizes un-creatively (The Triumphal Arch was designed for h*tler's plan to remake Berlin into Germania) about legacy while history prepares to do what it always does eventually with despots: it deposes them. One way, or another.
It is inevitable that his reign will end. Even the actuarial tables (PDF of NY Department of Health Life Expectancy Table) say his time is short (< 8 years) and his swollen ankles and discolored hand suggest it’s even shorter.
His vapid, cruel, hedonistic quest will end. His successors will not strike quite the right balance of pathologies he has and so they won’t really be able to have the kind of cult-like support he has had.
The pendulum of American mood and policies will swing back, and much that has been done will be undone.
There is only the question of timing: how long will it be and in the process exactly which of us will be cut down, mangled and traumatized into nothingness before his era ends. How much will he ruin before he goes.
Joy and endurance are resistance. Survival is victory. If you can protest, please protest in person or however you can.
I will finish here by waxing poetic-ish as my insomnia concludes and I start my day: Let’s let our pain and anger fuel something good. Let’s let our hopes and dreams flourish no matter what forces seek our demise. Let’s hasten a restoration and reformation of democracy, human rights, and let's do what Americans do: have no kings, not now, not ever.
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© Copyright October 17, 2025, David August, all rights reserved davidaugust.com
David August is an award-winning actor, acting coach, writer, director, and producer. He plays a role in the movie Dependent’s Day, and after its theatrical run, it’s now out on Amazon (affiliate link). He has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, on the TV show Ghost Town, and many others. His artwork has been used and featured by multiple writers, filmmakers, theatre practitioners, and others to express visually. Off-screen, he has worked at ad agencies, start-ups, production companies, and major studios, helping them tell stories their customers and clients adore. He has guest lectured at USC’s Marshall School of Business about the Internet.
