Sunday June 15, 2025,

A report on No Kings Protests

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1748:

Yesterday, throughout the day, I was delighted to see the reports of the unprecedented numbers of people showing up for the No Kings protests around the country and the world. I didn’t find quite as many new signs to show you during the day, but these three did make me smile. The last one was captioned, “Portland didn’t have Tanks but we had Llamas!”

I was most impressed by the turn-out in St Paul/Minneapolis, where—despite the terrible killings that morning and a suspect still at large--it is estimated 80,000 people still showed up.

I was proud of how my own city of San Diego did, with the police estimating that the turn-out for the protest held downtown was over 60,000. There were numerous smaller demonstrations held throughout San Diego County as well. Here is a video collage of the San Diego march, which gives you a good many other signs that were carried just in my city and I thought gave a good feel for what it must have been like to be part of this event.

I am seeing estimates of over 5 million for the total number of people attending the protest in thousands of locations, and my sincerest hope is that the politicians throughout the nation, witnessing the number of people who came out to the protests from small towns to large cities, from blue and red leaning states, will begin to gather the courage to do what is right for their constituents.

Personally, yesterday was a quiet as I worked to let my feet rest after I pushed them beyond what they evidently would tolerate on Thursday and Friday! Fussy things, feet. Anyway, I didn’t walk yesterday, but I did some time on the recumbent bike and some chair pilates, and most of the pain has subsided this morning. However, as this is Sunday, my major cleaning day downstairs—which means being up on my feet for about 2 hours, off-and-on, during the morning—I will probably not walk again today, but start off with some short walks tomorrow.

However, I discovered a couple more roses on my phone from Friday’s walk, so here is one of them to give you some beauty in your day.

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