Nancy Braus, a retired independent bookseller, is a longtime activist. Since she submitted this piece, two other similar and significant protests have taken place in Brattleboro and other towns in the region.
GUILFORD-It was impossible to read some of the accounts of April 5's Hands Off rallies around the country and the world and not feel that something has shifted.
In the face of a massive fear campaign by the Trumpers - arresting people for speech that did not meet the Dear Leader's approval - and for having tattoos, for protesting the Gaza genocide, for existing as a certain national or gender identity, millions of Americans came out. We even braved cool, rainy weather in the Northeast, where our turnout might have been even more massive if it was a sunny and inviting day.
Trump has been threatening protesters with vague penalties, with a kind of snarling attempt at intimidation that was bait for even more of us to emerge into the light.
The sights and sounds of large groups of people openly defying not just the political repression the MAGA fascists are trying to impose on all of us, but the spiritual repression, the dark and hopeless thinking, was renewing.
For all the seriousness of the moment - and it is deadly serious - the humor was welcome and really good. In my Vermont town, a guy had a big sign that read "my cows fart better ideas than trump."
People were generous with each other, and the spirit was that we can win this, that we can win the fight of a lifetime if we continue to build our movement.
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And this is clearly a movement moment, something we haven't felt since the Black Lives Matter activism, a movement repressed as quickly as possible by the powers that be.
New people of all ages, people who will tell you "this is my first protest," are emerging from their fear and despair about this insane, greedy, hateful new government. I am a pretty-well- known local activist, and I can't leave my house right now without someone - sometimes, someone I don't even know - asking me how to keep up with the protests, which companies to boycott, how to get involved in organizing.
Those of us who have the time - I am retired - and who have the powerful motivation to do everything we can to bring these guys down will hopefully be able to muster the spirit of April 5 to move onto even stronger statements of our intent to fight back.
The true numbers of attendees at the more than 1,200 protests held on one day around the country will never be known. Counting ours was impossible: People just kept coming and coming. And we did stand in the cold rain, and nobody grumbled. We believe we were about 2,000 came to Brattleboro, a town of 12,500. And that was minus many who we know traveled to the state capital.
The largest cities had hundreds of thousands of marchers, but so many smaller places where Donald Trump and his cult have dominated every aspect of political life also spoke out - and it was likely risky for some.
A wonderful Facebook post showed a photo of sign holders on both sides of what is clearly a small-town main street: "50 people in deep red Keyser, West Virginia, population 4,850."
Another post: 50 to 100 people (judging from the image) in western North Carolina, also described by the poster as very red.
In many of these places, I remember reading posts as recently as six months ago where residents expressed fear of placing a Harris campaign sign in their own yards, in communities where they despaired of the MAGA dominance.
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However many protesters proudly defied the regime, there were probably almost as many who would have been there but for fear of reprisal by the Trumpers. We know that the many Afghan and other refugees in our town - some of whom have developed strong local friendships - would have given a lot to feel safe enough to attend this protest, and we know we were speaking out for them.
ICE, probably by design, is being pretty cavalier about whom they grab, so I can only imagine that many brown-skinned folks might feel less safe about a protest. Millions of us really went out there for many more who don't feel they can exercise their free-speech rights in Donald Trump's Amerika.
It is likely that the smarter of the fools running this new regime of incompetents has noticed something, and it is even possible that these protests gave one of two of them pause. Some of them are continuing to post that all of us, a million or more, are paid protesters!
After one of the rocking, huge rallies featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I saw cranky drug-addled Elon Musk declare on his garbage website that "they just move the paid protesters around."
That seems to be their only explanation for our passion, and it reveals yet again how little the Trumpers understand how love and morality work. Some of us, and it turns out maybe most of us Americans, actually have a floor, we have a limit of cruelty we will accept in our names.
And when the Trumpers and their incompetent, lying, out-of-touch policies hurt everyone except the billionaires, and target our environment and our public health, people will actually act - out of self preservation, yes, but also out of love for our communities, for each other, for the natural world, and for truth.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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