‘A human community’

for Jody Hice. Rep. Hice has been invited, his staff has been notified and we already have 500 people,” Organizational Coordinator Tim Denson said.

Protests going postal

There are also political actions that don’t require in-person rallies, or even the ability to walk: groups nationwide started organizing postcard parties.

“It is something that allows people who may be homebound, who can’t march, to send a message,” said Louis Gary, a gay activist who heads up the Postcard Pink Slips project. “We get feedback from housewives who are not physically fit or mobile at this time and have other responsibilities that don’t allow them to participate. They say this is such a wonderful idea.”

Even if they don’t make it to the Oval Office, Gary said the National Archives collects a sample of activists’ mail to elected officials

March 3, 2017

for posterity’s sake.

Pink slip postcards are being sent to the White House and Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist. They will be mailed on the Ides of March, also a symbolic gesture. Historically, March 15 is revered as the day Julius Caesar was murdered.

“We all know that a pink slip is a termination slip and it’s a type of messaging, so that we can send them a pink slip and put them on notice that we think they are not suitable for the job description,” Gary said. “The messaging has to do with a lot of things we saw during the campaign: sexism, inappropriate and illegal touching of women, warmongering, separatists, xenophobia, homophobia, the whole debate about what is going on with illegal immigration and how we are dealing with it as a nation.”

Another Atlanta group, Postcards from the Edge, sends mail to the White House, to Congress, to Speaker Paul Ryan, to Mitch McConnell and to Georgia’s Congressmen. On Super Bowl Sunday, nearly 40 people came to Noni’s restaurant on Edgewood Avenue and wrote about 500 postcards. The event was so successful that organizer Alli Royce Soble decided to make it a monthly event. Soble, who identifies as gender queer and nonbinary, said after the election she felt her rights were being “tampered with.”

“For the first time in a while I felt like I had to put my activist hat on,” Soble said. “When I feel like there’s an anti-Semite running the country who has a cabinet who is anti-this, anti-that, and I kind of fall under several of the antis as a woman, as a gay person, as a nonbinary person, as a Jew. I’m kind of like, what can I do to help?”

She said to be effective, activists must “flood them at their front doors.”

“It’s clear that people are clearly unhappy with what’s going on,” she said. “Even if they don’t read one of them, and take it and toss it in the trash, it’s worth the effort to drop a huge stack of paper on someone’s desk and say, this is all from Atlanta. These people are pissed.”

“Social issues are really civil and human rights issues and those should be federally mandated. I don’t think a ‘social issue’ that has to do with transgender students should be determined on the state level,” Stover said. “We have to remember we’re a human community.”

That sentiment is a driving force behind Athens 4 Everyone, a community organization that began several years ago but became more involved with politics after the 2016 election.

“We still try to focus on issues that impact the lives of Athenians somehow. Since November, we have expanded that out a little more just because there are so many things coming down from the federal level,” Denson said. “The organizing efforts have had to really kick up for us and people are just com-