How will you answer the question?

Did I ever march?

Now there’s an interesting question in this spring of George Floyd.

Best answer I can come up with: Not as much as I should have.

Vietnam war protests were common during my college years, especially at a Quaker school like Earlham. But while I spent endless hours in bull session debates into the night about the war and U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, public protest displays on campus didn’t lure me.

There was a look-at-me aspect to it that didn’t appeal. Conservative and right-wing commentators call that “virtue signaling” these days, and there’s some accuracy in that label.

But it’s also true that protesting or demonstrating or holding a sign took guts.

And there’s something snide and dismissive by writing it off as “virtue signaling.”

Taking a stand requires an element of ego, but it also entails an element of risk.

That risk is easier to take on when you do it with others.

So, in the spring of 1969, when some of my fellow study-abroad college students suggested that we all take part in the giant May 1 march on Trafalgar Square in London, it was easy to say yes.

The march was a wild gumbo of political causes: Ban the bomb, stop the war, end apartheid, and more. Some of the participants were undoubtedly hardcore leftist political activists; some were almost certainly communists.

But most were there looking for a voice, trying to be heard, hoping beyond hope that the world could be a better place. If there were 150,000 people in the march, as I suspect there were, you could probably find at least 100,000 different agendas.

Some overlapped. Some conflicted. But all of them wanted to be heard.

Gabe, Guy, Steve and I took the tube from our rundown flat in the north of London to the center of the city that morning. The London Underground was busy and crowded, already it was a gumbo of causes.

As we neared our destination, a woman struck up a conversation.

“Are you boys naturists?” she asked.

I think we mumbled something about liking nature, but we told her that we were going to be marching against apartheid in South Africa. That was the issue the four of us had decided upon.

It wasn’t until later in the day that we realized she was attending the march to promote the cause of nudist colonies.

Like most marches, it was simultaneously stimulating and disappointing. Our voices got merged and muddled with a dozen different causes — including public nudity — in a way that made us feel we had wasted our time.

Fast forward 20 years and I found myself in another mass demonstration, something that dwarfed a march on Trafalgar Square. It was Tiananmen, the student uprising of demonstrations in Beijing.

Again, there were a dozen different causes: Democracy, an end to corruption, an end to government nepotism and a variety of economic agendas.

But this time, the stakes were higher.

A street march in London in 1969 would be tolerated by polite police officers along the route. Occupation of Tiananmen Square outraged the Chinese leadership and ultimately led to a massacre by government troops.

There was one similarity: I was pretty much a bystander, taking part but not assuming the mantle of personal risk.

Remembering my wife and daughters at home, I left the square that night of the massacre as things started to unravel. With a little luck and a cab driver who needed a generous tip, I made it back to my hotel not long after martial law had been declared.

Today, the marching has begun again.

I am proud that our daughter Sally took part in anti-Putin demonstrations in St. Petersburg when she was studying abroad in Russia.

I am incredibly proud that our daughters Emily and Maggie and their husbands and children have taken part in marches to protest the lawlessness of the Trump administration.

They’ll have a better answer to offer when they are asked years from now, “Did you ever march?”

How will you answer that question?