Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Patrick

There’s a bitter punchline baked into Robert Patrick’s line: a lifetime of protest reduced to a celebrity’s publicity arc. The verb “marching” stretches time until it feels absurd, as if dissent has become not a tactic but a default lifestyle, inherited like eye color. By starting “since we were babies,” Patrick isn’t claiming literal infant activism so much as skewering the way American political identity can be pre-loaded early, then looped as ritual.

The sting lands on “Jane Fonda famous,” a name that instantly drags Vietnam-era culture wars into the room. Fonda is a shortcut to a whole argument about media, morality, and who gets to be the face of a movement. Patrick’s intent isn’t primarily to litigate her legacy; it’s to point at the transaction protest can become: thousands of ordinary bodies in the street, and the headline attaches to the most photogenic, already-platformed figure. The subtext is resentment toward a system that metabolizes collective anger into individual branding.

It also reads like a Gen X mood in miniature: raised in the afterglow of massive movements, taught that marching is meaningful, then watching the machine convert sincerity into spectacle. “All we did” is the bleakest part. It suggests not just failure, but misdirected impact - activism that registers culturally as entertainment, or as a myth someone else gets credit for. Patrick’s actor’s eye is key here: he’s describing politics as casting, and the extras are tired.