We accompanied two friends to a “No Kings” rally Satuday in Kankakee. It has been decades since we personally witnessed any kind of political demonstration. The only other time was during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

As a still wet-behind-the-ears columnist in the old Neighborhood News section of the Chicago Tribune, I, along with others, was told by our editors to stay away from any “street action.”

Getting caught up in the turmoil of violence in the streets of the city, getting arrested or getting injured during one of the many street brawls, was not tolerated, we were told. Some stayed away but a few of us lurked in the dark street corners and became silent witnesses. Others — friends — were more active.

Through the years there have been other barriers to a reporter’s involvement

One of my close friends told me he never signed a candidate’s petition for office and never voted in a primary election in which he had to declare a party choice. Sharp-eyed precinct captains, he believed, could make reporting life difficult if you were on the “other side.”

I found out that it was more than a rant.

Sometime in the last decade of the last century at the presidential primary I asked for a Republican ballot. What I received was the ballot at my polling place and a few weeks later information from an old friend — the late Ken Kramer, who was a Park Forest trustee as well as the local Republican nose counter.

We even received a Christmas card that year from Bush two and Laura.

But this is 2025 and knowing that there is a meaner, hostile mood in America these days, when our friends asked us if we wished to go with them to Kankakee for a rally on the courthouse lawn, we thought that despite the threat of wet weather, why not.

Until heavy rain ended the rally after the first of its scheduled two hours, I was able to move through the crowd of perhaps 400 people who waved signs, signed petitions, greeted friends, and boisterously cheered the honking applause of passing cars and trucks.

If you didn’t have a sign, there was a table filled with wood slats, ready-made signs showing how you felt about conditions, and a heavy duty stapler to fasten the sign to wood.

There was a more personal, more important reason for me to go. I thought about my father; a man who fought against czarist tyranny in Russia more than a century ago.

At the age of 16 he was charged with working against the regime and was sentenced to life imprisonment in a coal mining prison camp 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Siberia, in which, he once confided, the ultimate form of protest was suicide. He endured mass hunger strikes and the daily struggle of wearing a heavy ball chained to his foot. For the rest of his life, one could see the deep indentation above his right ankle made by the metal cuff.

He survived and was freed in 1917, then traveled halfway around the world to find his brother in Canada. While I’ve often kept my opinions out of the public eye, my father never stopped his fight. He became a teacher in a private school system. During World War II he donated pints of his blood on a regular basis until the Red Cross told him that because of his age, he should stop. In the end, rheumatoid arthritis and a bad heart were his worst enemies in his later years.

This past Saturday, the day of hundreds of No Kings rallies, was also the 65th anniversary of my father’s death.

I thought of him at the rally and of what he might do if he were alive today and realized this was a good time to see for myself what I missed.

Jerry Shnay is a freelance columnist.

shnay35@yahoo.com