Late to the No Kings Day 3.0 protest in Portland as war rages in the Middle East

(Click on each photo to see a larger image.)

Today, March 28, 2026, marked the likely largest day of protest ever in the United States. No Kings Day, 3.0, took place in over 3,000 locations and all 50 states, U.S. territories, and globally. The day of protests, all over, was a defiant rejection of authoritarianism represented by President Donald Trump and a call a restoration of American democracy.

I arrived late to the protest in downtown Portland, Oregon, my current home. I spent about an hour and left, a bit deflated. I appeared to have missed the main events at midday.

I mostly focus on weekly protest events against the illegal acts by this administration, like the four-week-old illegal war on Iran, the illegal blockade of Cuba, efforts to end voting rights with dangerous voter suppression bill called the SAVE America Act now in the Senate, and dozens of other destructive, corrupt, authoritarian, and fascist acts of this administration and its senior officials like the use of modern-day concentration camps housing unlawfully arrested persons.

It’s a dangerous time too. The Strait of Hormuz remains mostly closed to marine traffic, as we entered in the fourth week of the horrific war on Iran, launched without lawful justification and without constitutional authority by this dangerous administration, with Israel. This is creating global economic disruption, spikes in global energy prices, and disruption to the flow of raw materials like fertilizer that help feeds the world. There is no end in sight.

The war is also far more dangerous than Americans are being told by this administration and the corporate and legacy media in the United States.

There was almost no coverage of a shocking drone “attack” on the Barksdale U.S. Airbase, in Louisiana, the week of March 9, 2025, that U.S. media mostly ignored. The incident was alarming for its implications to a strategic U.S. military base and the possible level of sophistication that points to a national actor, possibly China. News broke March 22, 2026. There were multiple waves of drone infiltration over several days, reports the Asia Times.

“The attack disrupted B-52H aircraft launches in support of Operation Epic Fury against Iran. It is the first time a US airbase was temporarily put out of operation in wartime, something that never happened even in World War II,” reported the Asia Times. “Each wave forced the Air Force to halt operations and send its personnel to shelters. Barksdale is the command hub of the US Air Force Global Strike Command.”

Also in March, reports have emerged of two separate missile strikes on the Saudi Prince Sultan Airbase, in mid-March and again on March 27, 2026. In the first attack reported on March 14, 2026, five large aviation refueling aircraft, KC-135s, were hit or damaged, and possibly three more KC-135 refueling aircraft were destroyed in the second strike at the same base, which injured 12 U.S. service personnel. Again, U.S. media coverage was apparently suppressed by corporate media.

However, NBC News reported on March 28, 2026, possible involvement of Russia in the latest Iranian attack on Prince Sultan Airbase a day earlier: “Russia took satellite images of a U.S. air base in Saudi Arabia three times in the days before Iran attacked the site and wounded American troops, according to a summary of Ukrainian intelligence shared with NBC News by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.”

All of these developments happened as the United States, per the direction of the Trump administration, is reportedly planning to stage up to 10,000 more troops in the Middle East, for possible use for a direct land-based attack on Iran. There is no clarity how the belligerents will bring hostilities to an end.

With love from Portland to Greenland and Denmark

In response to the ongoing threats being made by the leader of the United States to Greenland and Denmark, I want to say to my personal friends in both lands, and all the people that call those places home, we in the United States, the people of the United States, are your friends. We send love.

To show this, I took these photos this morning (January 25, 2026) in Portland, Oregon, at Nordia House, a cultural center celebrating the ties between Nordic nations and peoples and the United States.

Everyone who I met shared warm words for all the people in Greenland and Denmark. We the people will never sever our friendship. We the people are not spoken for by the increasingly dangerous man who is leading my country to a dark place.

To that darkness, I shine light. That light is the love you see here from the people, some who have relatives in Denmark and others who will be visiting.

To see all of my portraits as individual photos, visit the my “Love Portraits” page dedicated to the people of Greenland and Denmark.

A summer trip to Finland, in black and white

I spent two weeks in Finland in late August and early September 2025. I published the majority of photos on my Flickr account, where I have now collected photos from four trips I have made since 2023.

For some of my photos, I choose to create final images in black and white. I like Finland in color and black and white. Finland remains very special to me. Two of my great grandparents emigrated from South Ostrobothnia, Finland to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the early 1900s. On my last trip, I stopped in one of my ancestral villages, Kortesjärvi. It was my second time there. I felt a special feeling in my skin there. It’s hard to describe. It felt like home.

A taste of the southwest coast of Finland

I spent two days on the southwest coast of Finland in late August 2025. My trip took me to Kimitoon, technically an island, in the region called Varsinais-Suomi, whose biggest city is the historic former capital Turku. It’s mostly rural with lots cottages and farms on the island. I then crossed over to the region Uusimaa, which includes the coastal cities of Tammisaari (also a “cottage hub” area) and Hanko. I visited both of those cities, and ended the day spending a lovely evening in Tammisaari. On my route, I stopped by the bridge connecting Kimitoon to the “mainland” by the small community of Strömma. It was raining. The fishermen were out. It was lovely.

No Kings Day in Portland, a history making moment in U.S. democracy

In the United States, we just witnessed the single largest collective and nonviolent and peaceful protests ever in the history of our country.

That’s right: October 18, 2025, “No Kings Day,” will go down in American history as a defining day for our troubled, imperiled democracy.

The protests were mobilized around one theme: that in the United States we have no kings. And they took place to challenge the authority of a sitting president and his administration that have falsely called peaceful American cities, like my hometown of Portland, Oregon, “war zones.”

Current estimates peg the number of protesters at 7 million, at least, in more than 2,600 locations, spread throughout every state.

VISIT MY POST ON MY WEBSITE TO SEE MORE PHOTOS AND READ MORE.

In praise of Finnish clouds

Even shopping malls look mighty under clouds that hang over South Ostrobothnia, Finland. (Shot taken in Seinäjoki, Finland, August 2025)

I will be posting a large update later to my Finnish photo gallery on Flickr and some batches here. It’s been a very busy time with historic events unfold in the United States that are having me prioritize issues relating the safeguarding of U.S. democracy, in its now battered form, and the U.S. Constitution.

I also maintain a larger collections of stories, videos, podcasts, and photos on my website section dedicated to my connection to this great country, a land of some of my biological ancestors.

Memories of the North Rim, Grand Canyon

Today I learned, to my utter dismay, the historic Grand Canyon Lodge inside Grand Canyon National Park, on its North Rim, was destroyed by a wildfire.

There are few details outside of the initial announcement made the National Park Service the morning of July 13, 2025.

The lodge opened in 1937, and it has been run for years by the rapacious and problem-plagued Aramark concessionaire company, which for decades has poorly managed many national park public assets under government contract at parks like Grand Canyon.

*A historic photo at the the the North Rim Lodge, taken in the late 1930s. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service, for Creative Commons use only.)*

The lodge had one of the finest viewpoints I’ve ever had at any United States National Park, which serve as cultural and natural institutions that remain national treasures of all the American people. Long before white settlers stepped foot on the North American continent, all the lands in what is now Grand Canyon Park were the domain of indigenous tribes, who continue to call the area home.

As of midday July 13, 2025, two wildfires are burning on the North Rim, having burned more than 45,000 acres. The White Sage fire has burned 40,126 acres (16,200 hectares) near the North Rim, and the Dragon Bravo fire, burning to the south within Grand Canyon national park, has scorched 5,000 acres, according to the InciWeb website.

The moment I read the story about the blaze and destruction of the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, my mind raced back to the one night I spent there in September 2005.

I had flown down to Arizona from my then home in Anchorage, Alaska, to visit my old grad school roommate from our years together at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991 and after. He and his family had settled in beautiful Flagstaff. The trip allowed us to catch up and do an adventure–running across the Grand Canyon, one of the most famous and world-class trail runs in North America.

My friend and host, Jeff, was very ambitious.

Jeff plotted a run from the South Rim, to the North Rim, and then back (called “Rim to Rim to Rim,” in trail parlance). I would meet him at the Grand Canyon Lodge for the night and do the simpler and shorter “Rim to Rim run” (about 24 miles) from the North Rim to the South Rim only. My run is the classic run. Jeff’s run is for the truly hardcore trail runner, which he was at the time.

We got incredibly lucky, scoring a room in a cabin by the lodge that had a vacancy open up before I arrived. We had been prepared to camp out in the elements on the North Rim, but I am not sure how that would have worked. Even in late summer, it can be freezing at night. But fate was good to us.

Everything worked out perfectly. Jeff ran across solo safely to get our cabin room. I took the shuttle bus to the Grand Canyon Lodge, arriving after a five hour drive, near sunset, after spending the first half the day on the South Rim doing a canyon rim hike. We both got about four to five hours of sleep, awaking around 4 a.m. I ate a terrible pizza at the lodge’s subpar cafeteria to load up on carbohydrates.

We awoke in near freezing weather and darkness under the stars. We grabbed a photo in the dark at the North Rim Trailhead, just where the 6,000 foot descent to the Colorado begins.

I had a nasty spill that day, cutting open my hand on some sharp rocks, but otherwise the day was pure magic. We made excellent time, stopping at Phantom Ranch, by the Colorado River, to refill our Camelback water pouches and buy some food, and we got to the top of the South Rim by mid-afternoon.

I continued to do trail runs for many years after this epic outing, but this adventure, with a good friend, Jeff, remains my most memorable trail run.

I’ll always have that memory of standing on the edge of the canyon, at sunset, gazing at 2-billion-year-old metamorphic rocks turning purple and dark orange hues as the sun slowly slipped over the horizon.

Nothing ever truly lasts, but this news still fills me with sorrow. The country lost something special today that we will never have back.

(I published most of these photos 11 years earlier, and wanted to share them again with this memory of what is now gone forever: Grand Canyon Lodge.)

‘Democracy is a verb’

Every Friday since early April I have been joining a group of mostly older (like me) Portland residents at peaceful protests on Portland’s Sellwood Bridge during the Friday night, after-work rush hour.

The local organizers live in southeast Portland, like me, not far from Sellwood Bridge. The bridge is found on the south side of Portland, straddling the Willamette River. It’s a busy corridor for traffic heading from mostly Democratic and left-of-center leaning Multnomah County to a more evenly split jurisdiction politically, Clackamas County, which lies the south.

The organizers call their weekly civic event “Friday protests on the Sellwood Bridge.” It is an apt name. Their mission is simple too: “Our goal is to encourage our community to stay engaged and to use our voices and First Amendment rights to protest any erosion of our Constitutional freedoms or functioning government.”

The last event took place on Friday, May 30, 2025. My photos, all intentionally hiding most of the faces of the participants, were taken at the protest under sunny, warm skies.

That night, from about 5:30-7 p.m., over 75 folks assembled on the Sellwood Bridge to defend our country, exercise protected speech, and engage hundreds and hundreds of rush-hour commuters. We come with our own signs—painted, drawn, or marked out with Sharpies. Participants can also use the many more professional signs and repurposed but evergreen cardboard signs brought by the organizers.

On the last Friday of May 2025, the horn energy was righteous under the early summer sun.

Supporters in the passing rush hour cars, and also cyclists, outnumbered the few angry white male bird flippers by about a ratio of 25-1. That was encouraging.

Like previous weeks, I saw the outrage and solidarity in people’s faces. They showed with their expressions they were all in on the resistance themes. I observed how they leaned into their horns, giving protesters a thumbs ups, pumping their fists, and even yelling in support.

For the commuters, they see people engaged. They see protest happening. They see the signs focusing on: cuts to Medicaid, violations of due process, cuts to our federal health system, illegal firings of tens of thousands of federal workers, threats to the environment and education, the gutting of our federal bureaucracy, the illegal disappearance of lawful residents to gulags out of the United States, and more.

The drivers recognize that their frustration and outrage at the ongoing coup to the U.S. Constitution is not a personal assault, but one shared by their neighbors and our country. And man, were they laying in on the horns on May 30, 2025.

Graphic for Sellwood Bridge Protest — *The Sellwood Bridge Protest logo*

The importance of showing up, week after week

The protests each Friday on the Sellwood Bridge are all organic, with almost no coordination, outside of weekly email reminders.

A few people started the civil actions in February 2025, and they have grown. The entire purpose is to keep showing up, to keep calling out the violations of law by the current president, and to demand a restoration of law and the end of corruption and lawbreaking by the current administration of President Donald Trump, a convicted felon.

What’s important about the events each week is the consistency of civil disobedience and the act of protest.

Renown historian of 20^th century tyranny, Professor Timothy Snyder of the University of Toronto, in an interview on May 31, 2025, with MSNBC’s host Ali Velshi, said, “Democracy is a verb.” It’s not a static thing. It’s action. When there is action, others engage, and the acts themselves become part of a system that is vital to human goodness.

I think Snyder described the value of action so perfectly: “But we also have to recognize that it’s not on any one of us to solve the whole thing. Right. So each of us does a little bit, and together that changes the whole landscape.”

I plan to keep going to these events as long as my democracy is under siege, and it looks like it will be a long and painful four years, at least.

Portland, Oregon rally against the Trump administration, April 19, 2025

Protesters against the administration of President Donald Trump numbered at least 3,000 and shared a diverse range of creative protest signs, defending American democracy.

On the weekend marking the 250th anniversary of the first shots fired in the American Revolution against a tyrannical monarch and the British Empire, at least 3,000 people gathered in downtown Portland, Oregon to protest the administration of President Donald Trump.

The April 19, 2025 events kicked off at Pioneer Square, a gathering place for many public events in the city, and then the march took over the streets for over an hour. Protesters represented all ages and carried a wide array of colorful, creative, and biting signs criticizing Trump, Elon Musk, and the administration for its many actions. I saw about a dozen Portland police officers following on bikes, but mostly there was no visible law enforcement presence based on my observations.

There was no need for any police given the entirely peaceful nature of the civil action by thousands of people exercising their protected speech, as allowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The day was a fitting one too.

Nationally some have dubbed collective national protests on April 19, 2025, as “No Kings Day, Part II.” The reasons for unrest today have a striking similarity to what happened two and a half centuries ago, as British forces gathered in Massachusetts to confront increasingly rebellious colonial residents.

The issues that led to the first conflict of the American Revolution—the right to self-determination, liberty, democracy, the rule of law, a life free from the power of kings—helped to forge a nation 13 years later, in 1788.

That year, the newly christened United States of America was created through the adoption of a founding charter, the Constitution. While revolutionary, it was also terribly marred and flawed by enshrining slavery, our country’s greatest sin. It would still take over two centuries to guarantee the document’s original promise for all persons.

This framework for a nation, set forth in the Constitution, called for a system of checks and balances by three branches of government: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. On April 19, 2025, in Portland, people gathered with deep and profound concern that this sacred charter had been irrevocably broken by a man who has proclaimed himself to be a king.

At these protests in Portland, the residents who gathered to assemble recalled our original bold vision for a country with their calls for accountability, the rule of law, and the safeguarding of our democratic freedoms. Their demands reminded us all of our daring experiment to forge a more perfect union, stretching from 1775 to 1788, and grounded in our Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Lastly, I observed few persons from a group being targeted for enforcement and deportation action by this administration: Latinos. There was a lot of chatter online by some of the organizers (I can’t confirm who the organizers are based on published posts), who said it would be safe for all people. However, many Latinos are fearful in Oregon, given the cancellations this month of upcoming Latino cultural events statewide. I believe they do not want to be seen, photographed, or filmed at these events. There were very few African Americans too. The lack of diversity at this event is telling and needs to be discussed.

Greenlanders: Nobody’s Fools

This is my friend, Lars, who I had the great pleasure of meeting in 1998 in Sisimiut, Greenland. He took me seal hunting with his family, at a fjord just north of the coastal city. I did this trip with his brother and father.

This past week, from March 23 to 28, 2025, the world again saw Greenland and Greenlanders at the center of a global security debate if the United States could assert control of Greenland, beyond longstanding and existing security arrangements that have seen U.S. military on the island continuously since World War II.

After the snow settled, one outcome was clear: Greenlanders are nobody’s fools.

The mostly ethnical Inuit population have called the more than 830,000-square-mile arctic island, the world’s largest, their home for nearly 5,000 years. Today, Greenlanders number about 57,000 residents, of which nearly 90 percent claim ethnic Inuit identity.

They are smart, resilient, and fiercely grounded in their identity as descendants for nearly five millennia of their homeland, what they call Kalaallit Nunaat in their Greenlandic language.

They are not pawns, patsies, or stupid.

I can say this based on my own experience, having befriended many residents there during my visits in 1998, 1999, and 2000. During my trips now more than a quarter century ago, I had lively discussions with Greenlanders who shared divergent views of becoming independent or staying aligned under semiautonomous status with Denmark.

What is clear is that Greenlanders made abundantly clear to the world they are opposed to coming under greater military and political control of the United States, as announced by the Trump administration.

(See my full story on the significance of Trump administration’s plan to take full control of Greenland on my website.)

What Beautiful Light

Photos, Commentary, and Videos by Rudy Owens