PHOTO: Tom Spingola

Dear Everyone,

From the bottom of my over-full heart, and on behalf of the whole Human Banner team, THANK YOU!

Thank you for being among the 7,000 people who showed up for our No Kings Day "TRUMP MUST GO NOW!" banner.

“Seven thousand?” you say.

Yes — not five, not six, seven thousand!

I always try to be conservative, and on Saturday, I called it a solid 6,000. I knew 4,000 were required to pack the letters, and down on the sand and, later, in the photos, the letters all looked over-packed to me.

Counting the border lines, body by body, I realized we’d sailed past 6,000. AI's crowd-counting tool gave us a count of 6,800. To me, that’s Seven. Book it!

(Sometimes news media folk grab a shot before the message is fully formed, and they run with it. It took some hunting to find the shot above and the shot below, and I would not doubt that we exceeded 7,000 people, maybe 7,500. In any case, this event — our 36th over the past 20 years — took up the most territory and contained more people than ever before.)

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR JOINING US!

* * *

Last night, the team and I held a debrief Zoom. We started with a short dose of “Can you believe what a couple dozen unpaid volunteer organizers and 7,000 of their closest friends just pulled off?” We then spent more than an hour talking about the (seriously) hundreds of things we coulda, woulda, shoulda done better. And we closed with another round of “Can you believe…!"

One hundred percent: We are all in awe of how YOU — this far-flung community, this peaceful crowd so desperately in love with this great country, and so desperately hating to see it being destroyed — took this thing and made it happen.

We’ve had plenty of smaller-than-we’d-hoped-for crowds. YOU actually felt larger than we were prepared for, and YOU made it work. We did our very imperfect best, you did the rest.

There was a moment — we had just filled the first “T” and then half of the “R” — when I looked up at that vast sprawling stretch of letter-etched sand — 660 feet side to side, 325 top to bottom — and saw people flooding down from the sea wall. I thought: “There she blows, it’s out of our hands now…”

And it was…

You made it look effortless.

Awesome is an overused word, but you… YOU were awesome!

THANK YOU!

* * *

Please save Saturday, April 18th, for the next banner. It will have an Earth Day climate-based theme with a call to ditch this wretched oil addiction in favor of renewable energy, especially solar and wind.

16 days away.

Details and registration link to follow — by the end of this week, we hope.

Oh So Very Warmly,

Brad Newsham, Central Organizer
For the Human Banner-SF Team
humanbanner-sf.com