It was the scream which, at the conclusion of Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony, captured the existential dread of millions of Americans.
It also appears to have sparked a mass "resistance" protest movement.
On Wednesday night, thousands of Americans across the nation gathered to “Scream helplessly at the Sky on the Anniversary of the Election” to mark one year since President Trump's victory.
Thousands attended events planned in New York City, Philadelphia, Dallas and other major cities. The idea came from Boston, where people will gather in America's oldest park, the Boston Common, to scream. The premise behind the event was self-explanatory as people came to public gathering places, looked to the sky and, well, screamed.
This is how one Facebook event page described tonight's event:
Let's have a primal scream for the current state of our democracy! Gather together after work at Philadelphia's City Hall, or just scream in solidarity from your own backyard.
The Washington Square Park event planned in New York was more emphatic:
Join us cucks and snowflakes, safe spacers and libtards, as we enjoy a collective cathartic yell into the heavens about our current political establishment.
Explaining the motive behind today's screamfest, New York event organizer Nathan Wahl said that "frankly, I can’t keep up with it all. Every time I think of the laundry list of social injustices on top of my own shit like my actual laundry I get overwhelmed. Every news notification on my phone is a reminder of something over which I am powerless. And I think a lot of people feel that way. So fuck me for thinking it’d be nice to yell about it."
We really need some universal mental healthcare in this country and some anger management, while we’re at it. Which is kind of what this event is. It’s group anger management. No one’s crying. No one’s demanding anything. It’s a collective expression of frustration. It’s like… it’s like the feeling you have when you’ve been building Ikea furniture for three hours, and it’s late, and you feel like you’re getting nowhere, and you were almost done, but then you realized you put a piece on backwards and you have to take almost the entire thing apart and you just wanna fucking SCREAM. That’s what we’re doing?—?we’re screaming because living in America feels like building ikea furniture.
Secondly, I am doing something.
More than 15,000 people had expressed an interest in attending Wednesday’s scream in New York, including Joe Z. from Astoria, who told Metro it “might be helpful to bond with others who feel the same way.” Joe has found Trump’s presidency thus far “as awful as I feared — it’s a daily, sometimes hourly nightmare.” The main thing he intends to scream about is Trump’s measures against immigrants.
“Everything they do with immigration is about eliminating diversity from this country,” he said. “I live in Queens, diversity of cultures is what I most love about living here. There's no empathy for others in the face of the most callous cruelty to other human beings.”
Tonight's "scream" started off in a calm fashion as the following BuzzFeed clip shows...
People are gathering to scream at the sky in NYC to mark the one-year anniversary of Trump's electionhttps://t.co/aU89B4HfzA
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) November 9, 2017
... before the occasional clashes broke out.
Crowd members are clashing while screaming at the sky in NYC on the anniversary of the 2016 electionhttps://t.co/aU89B4HfzA
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) November 9, 2017
Meanwhile, there was a parallel event for Trump supporters who wanted to shout their joy over the events of the past year. According to RallyList.com, there was a nationwide screaming counter-protest to “Praise God for President Trump” and that “HRC is not our president.”