The headline for this column would be my sign if I had made one, but I’m just a reporter trying to register what I’m seeing and hearing on this sunny Saturday. So far, before the march even gets started, there are three medical emergencies — testimony to the size of the turnout and the law of averages, and maybe the number of old hippies and Vietnam veterans and children of veterans who fought in Europe or served in the Pacific fighting fascism in World War II, holding homemade signs saying they can’t believe they have to do it again here. But here we are, ancient mariners and youthful dissidents, more thousands of people than I’ve ever seen in Santa Cruz at the same time, hoisting signs, chanting slogans, singing songs, beating drums and waving American flags, Palestinian flags, Mexican flags, rainbow flags, a Ukrainian flag flying from a throne on wheels, among other banners.

Speakers at the rally before the march are diversity personified, with preferred pronouns: a Mexican Chinese American daughter of immigrants (she/her); a nonbinary Yosemite wildlife biologist (they/them) fired as a ranger in the national park for hanging, on their own time, a trans flag on El Capitan; a 24-year-old barista (she/her) and labor organizer from Verve with hair the color of fire — each of them giving an earnest if not exactly dynamic pitch for tolerance, science, solidarity — and then the token white man, radical lawyer Danny Sheehan (he/him), who delivers an incendiary closing argument. With force, urgency and rhetorical fluency he calls on people to fight the fascist regime, saying marching and demonstrating are fine and good but this is just a “first step”; “confrontation” and “direct action” will be needed to bring down this “illegal, unconstitutional administration.” (Electoral politics is unmentioned.)

The marchers this time around seem to me both mellower and more militant than in June, happier to be here on the street and more deeply worried about the dire state of the nation. The most striking and haunting sign I see is hand-lettered in heavy black marker on cardboard, a quote from “The Diary of Anne Frank” that’s totally up to date: “Terrible things are happening. People are being dragged out of their homes.”

A range of ages and genders and lifestyles are represented, mostly white people as far as I can see, polite Santa Cruz liberals like me, an endless parade of engaged citizens, some leaning on walkers or pushing strollers, some in wheelchairs or walking bicycles. The best costumes I see are on a group of four people in inflatable eagle-headed chicken suits. I don’t see any antifa terrorists, though I do see a few signs claiming to be “antifa,” but real antifa vandals and punks wear masks, like ICE agents, and don’t carry signs identifying themselves.

I’m writing this right after the fact, so I haven’t heard what happened today in other cities and whether or not they came off as calmly as this or were sabotaged by provocateurs trying to create an excuse for the faux king to send in the Marines.

“Crowds and Power,” Elias Canetti’s magnum opus, whose opening pages when I tried to read it were so dense with poetic-philosophical-psychosociological thought, it was too rich for my brain, I could not go on, though it’s one of those books I now wish I had read because maybe it would give me some insight into the magnitude and the meaning of what I’m experiencing, claustrophobic as I am in crowds; ever since the mass bummer at Altamont, too many people in one place gives me the jitters, even as benevolent an assembly as this, monitored by smiling volunteers, no cops in sight, no soccer hooligans or stampeding religious pilgrims, and I remind myself this is all good as we shuffle slowly en masse along Soquel Avenue.

I can’t help wondering how many millions will have to be in the streets all across the country, but especially the streets of big blue cities, before the war department takes extrajudicial action against “the enemy from within” as against those boats obliterated in the Caribbean, and what kinds of action ordinary citizens will be driven to and how many kinds of resistance and rebellion it will take to make a difference.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.