In the Edgartown parade, just ahead of the scampering chicken and the playful sharks with squirt guns, there came Indivisible with “No Kings” shirts and a Thomas Paine quote, followed by the Universalists’ banner “A Good Trouble Congregation”, a few Quakers, and then for the MV Peace Council there was one man alone with a sign that just said “Enough!”

Enough what?

It is said that some 25,000 people come to town for the Edgartown parade. A great many seemed to know what it meant for them. Amid boistrous applause and affirmations there were perhaps half a dozen who put thumbs down against what they thought it meant.

True, the ancestor of that sign is a button created by Jules Feiffer during the Vietnam War. But how about, there is enough. If you don’t hide it, if you don’t dog-in-a-manger squander it. How about, there are enough of us, and those who would divide us into alienated, fearful, isolated individuals are so few.

That sign was divided from Indivisible because Town officials told the organizers not to carry signs.

“Don’t make it look like a protest,” they said.

In Timothy Snyder’s essential little review of history, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, Lesson 1 is: “Do not obey in advance.”

Maybe that’s enough.

Bruce Nevin

Edgartown