Liberal activist? Yes! Paid protester? Nope.

Sean Spicer is half right. Lots of liberal activists are, indeed, showing up at rallies and marches and protests and Congressional Town Hall meetings these days. But we're not being paid to be there.

Case in point: when my husband, some of our fellow activists from SFV Indivisible (a grassroots progressive advocacy group that formed after the January 20 inauguration and now numbers more than 7,000 local groups nationwide) and I showed up, in response to open invitations on Facebook and Twitter, at Monday's "Not My President" rally at L.A. City Hall, one thing became crystal clear: no one was in charge.

There were no staffers with clipboards and sign-up sheets. No microphones. No stage. No agenda. No donation bucket. Just people, with hand-drawn signs.

As the crowd began to grow, uncertainty abounded: Where should we stand? What should we do? What should we say? Who would lead us?

The press -- representing all of the national TV networks, L.A.'s local channels, Spanish language networks and CNN, along with a wide swath of local, regional and national print and radio outlets -- seemed equally nonplussed. They watched. And waited.

And then, it happened. WE led us. The crowd assembled en masse on the steps of City Hall facing Main Street, and began shouting out the concerns that had brought us there, while city bus drivers and ordinary people heading to work drove by, waving and honking their horns in support.

Someone would initiate a chant -- "Not my president!" for starters -- and the crowd would pick it up. A group of young women with drums and other musical instruments arrived, lending melody and pulse to the chants that ensued.

"Love, not hate, makes America great!"

"You'll build a wall. We'll tear it down!"

"No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA."

"Stand up! Fight back!"

"My body, my choice!" -- which quickly transformed itself into a women's and men's call and response: "My body, my choice! Her body, her choice!"

"Dump Trump!"

"Don't lie!"

"Lock him up!"

"Black lives matter!"

"Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go!"

"Investigate! Impeach!"

Another call-and-response: "What does democracy look like? THIS is what democracy looks like!"

And then one that brought grins to more than a few reporters' faces: "Free press!"

As the chants continued, the group of a thousand or so, who had braved a rainy Southern California morning to attend, spontaneously began to march around to the Spring Street entrance to City Hall, where we filled the lawn and hillside steps leading up to the building and continued to speak our minds.

A jovial, peaceful march through downtown followed.

Throughout the day, officers of the Los Angeles Police Department stood on the sidelines, chuckling at one chant or another, and politely reminding stragglers to stay on the sidewalks and out of traffic. They were there to do their jobs: to protect and to serve those of us who had come to do our duty as citizens.

No one signed us up to join a group or receive any emails. No one exhorted us to donate to an organization -- although some enterprising individuals did set up tables along a sidewalk, where they sold political buttons and T-shirts. Several vendors cooked up sausages and vegetables, filling the air with savory aromas.

And no one paid us or offered us gifts to be there -- unlike the Trump "reelection" rally in Florida the prior Saturday, which had offered people cash or gifts on CraigsList in exchange for their attendance. There were no buses chartered by a left-wing version of the Koch brothers, as there were at Tea Party events in 2009 and 2010. There were no pre-printed signs handed out by a political organization.

No, Mr. Spicer, we are not paid protesters. We are not mercenary agitators. We are Americans, exercising our First Amendment rights, and demanding a hearing with the public servants we elected to represent us.

You, and your boss, would be well served to recognize those facts -- and to start listening to us as we speak up and speak out about your legislative proposals and your harmful unilateral actions.

Because we will keep rallying. We will keep speaking out. And we will be heard.

Nothing new, New York Times: Shopping has always been political...for people of conscience

Two business writers at the New York Times alerted America just the other day that shopping has, in the age of POTUS #45 and his self-aggrandizing, misogynistic, emoluments clause-violating ways, suddenly "become" political.

Julie Creswell and Rachel Abrams, authors of a Feb. 10 piece, "Shopping becomes a political act in the Trump era," did a solid job of reporting on the current boycott-don't boycott battle being waged between opponents and supporters of the new administration. But they ignored history.

If you grew up in a family like mine, politics and social causes regularly played into the purchase decisions that my mom and dad made. I knew from an early age that we'd never find Sugar Daddies in our kitchen candy drawer: they were made by the Welch family, whose patriarch was a founder of the John Birch Society. There would never be a Ford in the garage: Henry Ford may have been a master of mass production, but he was an anti-Semite, and my dad was Jewish. We drove Chevys.

Heck, even the house I grew up in was a social justice-inspired purchase. My dad -- an Army officer in World War II -- left the military after the war's end, disillusioned by the racial segregation he'd seen in the armed forces. He and my mom could have bought a home in one of the "better" post-war suburban tracts of 3-bedroom, 2-bath stucco ranch homes popping up across the San Fernando Valley in the early 1950s. But they bought in the less desirable northeast corner of the Valley because deeds to the homes there didn't include racial covenants. I came of age believing that everyone was equal, and could live wherever they wanted -- and that everyone else in America thought so, too.

While I eventually was disabused of that idealistic notion, my appreciation of purchase choices as political power continued to grow. We added Carl's Jr. to the don't-go-there list after Carl Karcher's extreme right-wing positions became known. Ditto for Olive Garden when its owners took an anti-gay-rights stand. And Wal-Mart has always been on the family boycott list, given its habit of undercutting Mom & Pop businesses to make it the only place left to shop in small towns, its push to limit employee work hours to avoid having to provide health benefits (and instead directing its employees to apply for public-funded Medicaid), and its resistance to unionization and a living wage.

Today, Whole Foods and Papa John's Pizza have been added to my own family's no-go list -- their owners having fought the Affordable Care Act, and Papa John slashing employees' work hours to keep them off his health insurance plan. Chick-fil-A is there too, thanks to its we'd-rather-hire-Christians religious bigotry and its anti-gay stance.

So, no, New York Times, you're wrong: shopping politically has always been a "thing." It's just more noticeable today. In the days before the Internet, people in Hoboken had no idea that folks in Hollywood were also driving past their local Carl's Jr. and eating at Wendy's instead. Clevelanders didn't know that California table grapes were being boycotted until wire services ran photos of Bobby Kennedy marching in California with Cesar Chavez and striking United Farm Workers union members.

While boycotts didn't come with a hashtag -- like the impactful #GrabYourWallet effort Creswell and Abrams wrote about -- and didn't grow as big or as quickly as they do today, they've always been a weapon in the political and social justice arsenal. They grow out of the same age-old effort by people who want to fight injustice, hatred and discrimination by using the most powerful weapon we possess: our hard-earned dollars.