By China Cassidy Following the numerous protests taking place across the United States sparked by the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by police officers and the #blacklivesmatter movement, residents of Holbrook gathered at Gillespie Park for a peaceful demonstration of support coordinated by Holbrook resident Ricardo Escobar and supported by the Holbrook Police Department. Though not uncommon in the bigger cities, protests and demonstrations are an uncharted territory in most rural areas like Holbrook. Escobar said creating a space for the people of Holbrook and other small towns who are also being impacted by the current events was just one motivator behind seeing the protest through. “I think too often we only hear about things taking place in big cities, Chicago, New York (and) L.A., and I guess I just wanted to show Holbrook that it doesn’t have to just be the big cities that get involved. It can even stem out of towns that have historically and currently been fairly quiet about these things. We can change that.” He said he wanted to show Holbrook citizens that there is no need to be afraid of speaking up, “even if the town has a certain reputation, maybe not bad but on the quiet side of things, we still have that right,” said Ecsobar. Although he has taken part in protests when he was a grad student in Washington State, coordinating a protest in a small rural community was quite different given the lack of existing platforms. He explained, “What was different is I was a student and it was on a college campus where you have a lot of the spaces already that lend itself to organizing and building the community. Here in Holbrook, I didn’t really have that. Escobar said that after he announced his intention to hold a peaceful protest on one of Holbrook’s in social media pages, he received several different reactions from the community. Some comments implied that his mission would have a negative impact and others thanked him for demonstrating what it is to exercise their first amendment rights. According to Escobar, he received a call from Holbrook Police Chief Nathan Christensen who said he wanted to assist in securing the area to ensure that they would be able to carry out their protest in a safe and secure space. As a result, there were no incidences and even though he showed up only expecting the four or five he knew would be there, the head count reached nearly fifty by the end of the night. “What I find really interesting is that sometimes people will criticize outsiders for protesting or exercising their first amendment (right) and saying that it is destroying their community. I found that it did the exact opposite last night. I saw people meeting each other for the first time. I met people that I never met before in the span of an hour. Probably more people than I’ve met in my entire two years here. So, it wasn’t just a demonstration, it was a community building. “It was showing that solidarity and support. If you’ve been terrified, if you’ve been feeling all of this anger and hatred around us 24/7 across the media and the state, last night was a way to get a little bit of relief from that.”
