What does the silence mean?

From an information flow perspective, weekends are always a disruption.  Monday to Friday, everyone is pumping out their opinions, reporting and data but that slows come the weekend.  There are still many opinions and some reporting and a little data, but it is a different and lesser magnitude.

Friday, we get the Dobbs decision kicking abortion laws back to the states.  Dobbs itself arose from a new abortion law in Mississippi which, strikingly, are still more expansive than those in most nations in Europe.  Listening to NPR you would think we are trembling at the brink of constitutional collapse and the systemic brutalizing of women.  Abortion is a serious matter.  It warrants serious thought.  It warrants widespread consent when translated into law.  Conditions missing for the past fifty years.  

We will arrive at answers across the US and my suspicion is that they will look much like those in Europe.  A personal decision in the first trimester, a constrained decision in the second, and very constrained in the third.

Regardless of how that decisioning rounds out over the next five years, I was interested in the advocacy responses.  The mainstream media, substantially disjointed from popular opinion, were amplifying dramatic calls for protest and direct action.  Almost calls of civil disobedience and insurrection.

All through Friday afternoon and through the weekend I kept hearing about plans for major demonstrations all across the nation.  I heard the calls but saw no demonstrations.  

Perhaps it the weekend news rationing issue?  I wait till Monday for the first coverage of major demonstrations all across the nation protesting the decision.

And I am still not seeing anything.  Nothing in the New York Times, nothing in the major aggregators.  

I don't think there was nothing.  From local reports here and there, I have the impression of multiple demonstrations and protests but with participation in the dozens or low hundreds.  

I don't know quite how to interpret this yawning silence.  Were there no major protests?  Maybe they will be occurring this week?  Are people simply exhausted about the topic?  Is it too difficult to gin people up over a legal/legislative issue when they are confronting generational inflation rates, shortages, plunging savings accounts, etc.?

I don't know.  But it is striking.

It reminds me of some incident back in the mid-1980s.  Memories of the late 1960s summer riots were still reasonably vivid.  There was some issue which Jesse Jackson (before all his scandals) was trying to work up some political position for.  He was on the networks, more in sorrow than in anger, warning of "a long hot summer" unless the establishment yielded to his demands.  A hardly veiled threat that unless his demands were met, the streets would once again erupt.

As it turned out, there was no long hot summer.  No race riots as Jackson was sotto voce implying.  His threat, made to gain negotiating traction, ended up undermining him.  He was not a leader who could command legions.  He was not a social forecaster who could accurately forecast the heat of the street.  He became an ever less relevant footnote.

The chattering class is certainly chattering, but where are the feet of people on the ground demonstrating a groundswell of opposition.  Hard to believe that it doesn't exist but even harder to believe that it is not being reported.