Today, I find myself reading *Letter From a Birmingham Jail,* hoping to feel some familiarity. The essay by Dr. Martin Luther King doesn't deal much in metaphor as his speeches had. Instead, we get a sobering look into the practice and purpose of protest.  > Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. Contemporary political movements like *No Kings* (no relation) are, I fear, intentionally divorced from these Civil Rights tenets. Not so much by the people who make up these protests, but by the organization itself. Recent protests are grand in scale, and are well-branded, but it lacks crisis. It lacks disruption of the status quo. It lacks direct action. And, to squash any misguided grace for the *No Kings* org, these specific marches are not simply one layer of a multitude of diverse tactics. No, *No Kings* operates, exclusively, within the grooves of political decorum, careful never to spill over and cause inconvenience to those we are protesting. It's this proper behavior that a *No Kings* march strives to achieve. No Kings uses “non-violence” to mean “non-disruptive.” But, that’s not how Dr. King defined the term. “Non-violence” in the Civil Rights era was a discipline. It taught us how to react *after* we had disrupted the status quo, as retaliation from the state would be an inevitability.