Bread and Circuses With Two-Day Shipping
Convenience Is Costing You More Than You Think
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." — Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849
I started writing a piece about the No Kings march on March 28. Eight million people showed up nationwide. That sounds like a lot until you remember what we’re trying to stop: wars, invasions, white supremacy, and fascist dictatorship. I fought it for two weeks before it died on my pen. Then I realized I wasn’t writing about the crowd. I was writing about myself. The gray hair was mine. The polite chanting was mine. The feeling that we were performing resistance instead of actually doing it, that was mine, too. I haven’t canceled my Amazon Prime. I’m still getting coffee from Starbucks. I still buy groceries and gas from Walmart. I didn’t chant as loud as I could or stick around as long as I should have. I’m one of those people who marched like it was a social engagement and then hurried home to mow the lawn. Showing up was the easy part. Now we have to close our wallets.
After the march, I couldn’t stop thinking about Bangkok, Manila, and Kyiv. Especially Bangkok. I’ve felt what it’s like when the anger is focused and the cause is the only thing that matters. Nobody there was worried about how they looked or who was watching.
We were sitting at an outdoor restaurant enjoying dinner when we heard a rumbling noise coming down the street. Strange sights and sounds weren’t unusual in Bangkok after dark. We just kept chatting. Our conversation stopped when my friend Som stood up and pointed toward the street. “Tanks!” he shouted. We all watched them roll by, one after another. After they passed, we went right back to our conversation and our meals. The people at that table had spent their lives inside Thai politics, from the highest offices to the streets. They knew what those tanks meant. They kept eating not because they didn’t care, but because they had already decided what they would do when the moment came.
A few years later, I was standing at nearly the same place. This time I was behind a line of grandmothers, students, farmers, taxi drivers, and teachers, all locked arm in arm. There weren’t hundreds of people; there were thousands. Across the street were rows of soldiers in combat gear. The resistance wasn’t organized. They had no leaders. They came by train, by bus, and by motorbike. They sang, they danced, and they resisted. They didn’t need inspiration. They were the inspiration.
I didn’t feel any of that on Saturday. What I felt was more like an outing. An obligation. I was convinced I had done my part and could still make it home to trim the lawn. I wasn’t breaking out of the company town. I was just taking a scheduled walk inside it. I’m waiting for a moment that may never come.
When I was growing up, my father and I would often talk about injustice in America. He voted Republican and became more conservative as he got older, but at the time he was still more influenced by his ideals. He grew up in the Depression. His father had taken in people who were down on their luck, and my father realized most of us were losing touch with what that was actually like. He often told me the problem with Americans was that as long as the government gave them their bread and circuses, they would never complain. It didn’t matter what was done to them or what rights were taken away. It never clicked with me back then. He said it so much it became a running joke. His tagline. Years later, I tried to talk to him about Reagan and how the Republicans had become the party of bread and circuses. But it was too late. He couldn’t see it anymore. That was the last time I thought about it.
I didn’t think about it again until I was driving home from the protest.
Alex Pretti left his job as a nurse to stand up for others, and the state gunned him down. Renee Good, a soccer mom, put her vehicle between ICE agents and her neighbors and was shot for it. That’s what meaning it looks like. That’s scary. That’s personal. I am not Alex Pretti. I am not Renee Good. They are not alone. There are others we don’t know the names of yet. But I have been writing checks to the people who sent the state after them, and that I can stop. Amazon, Walmart, and the rest don’t just sell you convenience. They fund the cloud infrastructure, the facial recognition, and the data pipelines that ICE and the surveillance state run on. Every Prime renewal is a small contribution to the machine.
I live in a small community. The grocery choices are Walmart or Kroger, and they are equally complicit. The alternative is an hour’s drive to the city, hoping they have what I need, which often isn’t the case. So I defaulted to Amazon. Prime, Audible, the whole ecosystem. The government and the marketplace both win when they make you feel like you need whatever they’re selling. Prime is bread and circuses with two-day shipping.
I canceled both today. Resistance requires actual resisting.12
Explaining that to my 94-year-old mother was harder than I expected. I have an old Kobo collecting dust that I’m pulling back out. The Kindles will find new homes.
I know this math doesn’t work for everyone. The people most hurt by this system are often the least able to opt out of it. That’s not an argument against trying. It’s an argument for those of us who can to do more.
These are small moves. But they’re mine, and they’re real. That’s where it starts. And on May 1, millions of people are making the same calculation I made in my driveway, that starving the machine is the one language power actually understands.
I keep thinking about my father and the phrase I spent years treating as a punchline. Looking around Saturday, most of us were over sixty. We came because our parents had lived through the Depression and taught us, even when we weren’t listening, that government of the people has to actually help the people. We came knowing that rights not defended are rights already lost. The ones who weren’t there are still sitting at the table when the tanks roll by. Juvenal wrote that as a warning in 100 CE. The American government of 2026 has made it a policy. We deserve more than Netflix and expensive eggs. May 1 is a general strike and a boycott. I’ll be there, and this time I won’t be hurrying home to mow the lawn. Dad, you were right. I just needed the tanks to come close enough that I could hear their rumble.
Also see: https://www.boycottcitizens.org/ice