I can’t stand by and do nothing while our republic is replaced with a fascist dictatorship. As I wrote earlier this week, it hit me rather traumatically that I need to stop waiting to do something about the helplessness I feel right now, and I need to start DOING SOMETHING about it.

That first came in the form of doing lone protesting earlier this week, which is a thing that was incredibly uncomfortable for me to psyche myself up to do, but as I mentioned, I’ve come to understand that it’s actually our most potent personal political power, possibly more than voting. When you stand somewhere alone on a public sidewalk, quietly holding a sign, you command the attention of your neighbors. Your message is unambiguous and it is impossible to justify its suppression without drawing immediate attention.

As I went through the process of making my sign, it occurred to me that sign-making probably ought to be easier to accomplish in general. Sure I could have used markers to write something out, but I have terrible handwriting. We live in the computer age anyway. Except I didn’t have access to a giant sign printer. Unless I wanted to go find one at maybe like an office supply store? Frankly, I didn’t want to go down that path.

So I decided to use my own home printer. This would require me to create a bunch of tiles out of 8.5"x11" paper and cut and assemble them together on the 22"x28" poster board I had already picked up a week earlier. Designing the sign and tiling it was doable with software I already had, but it wasn’t exactly super dead simple to figure out how to do either. I can figure out how to use these programs. Not everybody can.

You shouldn’t need to use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Acrobat to make a large tiled sign. Maybe such things can be done in applications like Microsoft Word? But again, that’s just yet another program others might not have easy access to and need to figure out. There should be a dead simple and free process for digitally making signs like this that doesn’t even require access to a computer or downloading apps. Many younger folks use phones only for everything, and tend to eschew desktop computing altogether.

In a republic, the barrier to entry for exercising the right to protest should be zero. That’s why I made Go Protest Now! It’s entirely free to use, works on desktop and mobile in any web browser, and there is no monetization strategy here and no data mining I’m doing. DreamHost (my site hosting provider) does track site hits, but I’m certainly not doing anything on my own.

Hopefully, you’ll find this to be a useful tool. You can get a sense of what its workflow is like in this other post I wrote up about it. The most important thing isn’t what kind of sign you have, but that you get out there and let your neighbors know what’s going on. Whether it’s through protesting, or talking to friends, neighbors, and strangers. People need to know about the current situation so that they can join in and help us to stop it.

There is an urgent need to take action now. Good luck to all of us! ✊