Nothing attracts a crowd, like a crowd.

On the corner of La Paz and Marguerite in Mission Viejo, Salt-N-Pepa plays, people march and democracy is cherished.

They gathered at the corner of La Paz and Marguerite in Mission Viejo yesterday afternoon, a gaggle of, oh, 90 people concerned more about democracy than Q rating. It was nothing sexy. No newspaper scribes or tabloid photographers elbowing one another out to capture the magic. Mostly you had senior citizens, spaced out along two of four corners, homemade signs aloft, fists balled.

A good number of cars drove by and honked. A few assholes with antagonism in their hearts rolled down windows and flashed middle fingers. Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” blared from a speaker.¹

The gathering was nothing.

The gathering was also everything.

It was easy to show up to one of America’s myriad pro-democracy marches last Saturday, when millions upon millions of people felt empowered by millions upon millions of other people. The band Soul Asylum first observed that, “Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd”—and it’s true. Wanna motivate your friends to hit up a party? Tell them about all the folks already at the party.

So, really, what made yesterday’s gathering special was that there was nothing overtly special about it. I arrived at approximately 12:20 pm, urged by Tasia Surch of the group SouthOC4Democracy to behold what they had been working on. Beginning back on Feb. 5, she explained, volunteers have congregated weekly at this precise spot—a deliberate stone’s throw from the offices of Young Kim², the Republican congresswoman who seems nice enough but stubbornly refuses to disengage from her Donald Trump IV drip. Attendance at the Wednesday marches has varied—14 on a rainy day a bunch of weeks back, 300 on Feb. 17, 90 (or so) yesterday.

But they come.

And they come.

And they come.

And they come.

Why? Well, here’s Fiona Carroll, a retired teacher and frustrated American …

And Fiona nails it. People are tired and scared and fed up, and instead of staying home and eating chocolate-covered pretzels while pleading with Lochlan not to use the blender, they gather together, on this street corner, and urge passers-by to listen while also gaining satisfaction via cohesion. Before the afternoon wraps, a person collects notes from the attendees, all of which will be hand-delivered to Kim’s office. Will the congresswoman personally read them? Honestly, odds are greater she feeds the slips of paper to a goat. But the point is bigger than that.

Democracy dies when Americans stop caring. When we, as a collective, decide to shuffle through life as the aspiring authoritarians ban books and corrode history and warp stock markets and convince us that, ultimately, nothing matters. That Big Brothers owns us.

So to turn out on a Wednesday afternoon, when the numbers aren’t enormous and the lights aren’t bright, isn’t merely an act of protest.

It’s an act of survival.

Of patriotism.

Photos by Jeff Pearlman

1. In case you might think this song is a political rallying cry, well, um, eh—read the lyrics. It’s not. :)

2. Not to be confused with Young MC.