WELCOME TO THE RESISTENCE

I have a hat. I have several hats. Simple workingman's hats. My favorite, my winter hat, is a black replica of a Greek Fisherman's cap. It has sentimental significance, my son sent it to me for a long ago birthday from NYC. He vaguely remembered that I had had a Greek Fisherman's hat many years earlier. It was wool and had an elongated button on it reading, SAVE THE WHALES under a humpback whale image. I purchased that hat at a thrift shop in Honolulu and wore it on a sailing sojourn across the Pacific, to Sausalito California. The button was a going away gift from a friend of mine who was a member of Greenpeace. 

We wear hats for more than a way to keep our bald-spots dry. We wear a hat that represents an aspect of us. A wag in the 30s talked of the duality of hats; you wear a hat, or the hat wears you. My simulated Greek Fisherman's hat has a pin on it too. A round white pin with a red circle around the name TRUMP, and a red horizontal slash through it. The meaning is unambiguous. In the same way I opposed the whale hunting industry in the 1970s by sporting that pin, I oppose everything that piece of shit dictator-in-chief stands for in the 2020s. Whenever I wear it, and I wear it often, people always say, " I like  your hat",  sometimes multiple times per day. I remember a far-off time when women had millinery shops and men shopped in hat shops. My grandpa Guild had a brown crushed wool hat that he wore everywhere outside their house. Not really an elegant hat, but even in OshKosh bib overalls, grandpa was a distinguished gentleman. Men wore red hunting hats, called crushers, they wore hats like grandpa's, they wore porkpie hats, they wore elegant Borcelino's, the Sam Spade detective hat of Humphrey Bogart. John F. Kennedy was the last president to wear a snap brim hat, though Lyndon Johnson, a son of Texas, wore a non-descript Stetson. President Kennedy wore it with style. Like Humphrey Bogart wore a hat. LBJ wore the hat as an afterthought. In the same way he wore cowboy boots. There's a thing about shoes that I will save for another day. 

When people tell me they like my hat, it is not the hat that they like, it's that pin with the red diagonal slash through the circled Trump name. It is to say, I hate the piece of shit too! Often they are young. Hats mean nothing to young people today without the sports icon on the brim. Hats that all too often are worn with the brim protecting the back of the neck, and not shading the eyes, the widows peak showing through the adjustmant band. Except for the political or team symbol, they wear a cap like LBJ wore a Stetson. As an afterthought. There is a long history of wearables used to signify political thought. MAGA wears hats to signify being unable to think. It is the fascist symbol of choice in our time. And we wear our hats, and sometime our clothes festooned with printing and buttons opposing, or more likely insulting, the dictator-in-chief. Things got worse under Donal trump.

In WWII Germany there was the White Rose Society on college campuses. In Norway, the resistance recognized each other by wearing a simple paperclip on their collar. Subtle but effective. Resistance is  done subtly. It is how the powerless oppose the too powerful. In the 1936 Olympics there was a brother-sister team who were competitive rowers from Sweden. The brother was an Olympic medal winner. The two of them would row Jewish refugees to safety in small boats across the North Sea. I wrote once about a Jewish man I met many years ago who escaped to safety in a little 9' sailboat, a Sydney Sabot, sailed by a member of the Danish underground. The famous French Mime, Marcel Marceau helped Jewish children escape France using his talents for mime. We resist because we must. The resistance is done subtly. With the expressiveness of a mime, and the subtlety of a nod. 

History is like that. It's not the machines of war, or the strength of an army or navy, it is the sacrifice by little people not able or capable of wearing a uniform, to assist quietly in undermining the occupier on your streets. It is the restaurant-owner who denies the puppy- killer lady an indoor toilet. It is the attorneys who make the occupier waste their time in court. And there are the silent people who refuse to submit to authoritarians. 

Welcome to the resistance.