No one can save us from Trump but ourselves

Once more into the woods with the dog

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I was talking to my mom a few days ago. She was in Kearny, Arizona, and unhappy.

“There’s no wifi here,” she said.

Mom is 88. She drove to Arizona a couple of weeks ago with my sister, Erin, who was going for a long hike in the desert.

Erin had a plan and a purpose, but after Erin went into the desert, Mom’s agenda was open, and somehow she landed in Kearny.

“If I could go to a museum or something,” she said, but all Kearny has that anyone would want to look at is a very tall copper smelter.

Mom is tough, but on the phone this day, she sounded forlorn. I urged her to go somewhere else.

“You don’t have to suffer. You don’t have to endure it just because you can,” I said.

“It’s good to hear your voice,” she said. Then the source of her anxiety came out. “I can’t believe what’s happening to our country. I want to be home with my friends, to do something.”

Many of us have the feeling that we want to defend what we believe in, politically and morally, against what our president and his followers are doing, and many are putting aside our feelings of powerlessness to act.

“The day after the election, I had some folks in my life who came to my office, because they needed to be around … and could not deal with male energy,” said Kate Austin of Glens Falls, a business owner and activist.

“I got feeling protective and fired up about everybody feeling that way, looked down at my hands and thought, what do I have to bring to the revolution here?”

Austin created a social media account called Glens Falls Queen Team.

“I started posting things that I thought would make people feel better,” she said.

The Queen Team has now scheduled a self-defense seminar (four slots remained open on Saturday) and held a poetry slam at Rock Hill Bakehouse and two women’s marches in downtown. Bella and I happened on the second one two Saturdays ago and saw hundreds of people marching, cheering, shouting and smiling.

Feeling that the country is being burned down around us can be overwhelming, Austin said, but — “Building a sense of community is big.”

Candice Frye took this photo of Kate Austin, with bullhorn and sign, and others in the first local Women’s March this year, held on Jan. 18 in downtown Glens Falls.

On a Saturday morning in early February, Hannie Varosy went out on the corner in front of the Bancroft Library in Salem by herself with a sign of protest. A couple of people joined her. By Saturday, March 15, more than 130 were out on the sidewalk and yesterday, March 22, it was even more.

“People are so scared. It’s really frightening. People are worried about their Social Security,” said Sue Clary, the supervisor of Salem.

“The damage that’s been done is unbelievable. I hope we have a democracy for our kids,” she said.

The atmosphere Saturday in Salem was far from gloomy. It was more like a reunion, camaraderie overflowing with a cheerful sense of purpose.

A crowd of well over 100 people showed up Saturday morning at the four corners in Salem to protest the Donald Trump administration.

The local Indivisible chapter has organized an empty chair town hall with an invitation to Congresswoman Elise Stefanik — sure to be refused — that is taking place today, March 23, at Crandall Public Library. It is already filled to capacity.

Indivisible, a grassroots pro-democracy movement, was started in response to Trump’s first election victory but has, after his second, been growing fast here and across the country.

“People want to take part. They want to be active,” said Catherine Atherden, a former Queensbury Town Board member and a team leader for Indivisible’s immigration committee.

Atherden is also a leader of the North Country Light Brigade, which holds up political messages in lights on the footbridge over Quaker Road and at Centennial Circle.

Trump’s team has a “flood the zone” strategy, but all of us who value civil rights and want to protect our constitutional form of government can flood our own zones in our own neighborhoods. What is happening in the communities across the country will, over time, matter more than what happens in Washington.

Many have expressed disappointment in the wan and timid response of our elected Democratic leaders, and I get angry every day at the way our national media normalizes Donald Trump.

But maybe it’s better this way — the onus is on us to defend the country we want to live in.

Forrest Hartley, who has written for decades in columns in the Post-Star about his life in the countryside of Hadley with his wife and kids and oxen and sheep and goats and chickens and gardens, has also been speaking out about how disturbed he is by the cruelties now being condoned.

He wrote recently about feeling disillusioned by changes in friends from his old church.

“As I saw things changing in that community, I saw I no longer fit, and have tried very imperfectly to make it on my own, while still feeling what I was taught in my youth was a good truth and the right way to be,” he wrote.

“The words of Jesus that are underlined in some Bibles in red, those haven’t changed for me. That’s it, that’s my guiding principle,” he told me Thursday on the phone.

Forrest is not a preachy person, and for decades politics rarely, if ever, made an appearance in his column.

But he’s been waking up in the night upset at what’s happening and felt compelled to say something.

All of us should be upset and waking up and doing whatever we can to fight back.

Carrie Croft came to the Salem protest from Arlington, Vermont, with her friend, David Weitz of Providence, Rhode Island, to prove that passionate political dissent can also be clever and amusing.

Spring firsts

With the warmth and the sun this week, it has been time for seasonal firsts for me, Bella and Ringo, including our first walk on the Feeder Canal Trail and our first foray into Cole’s Woods.

Ringo was excited to be back on the trails in Cole’s Woods on Thursday. On the other hand, Ringo is always excited to be in a new place, and he gets quite excited just to be outside, going for a walk.

We stopped near the Feeder Dam on Tuesday to sit on a bench and listen to the Hudson River’s spring torrent pour over the dam. The sound of it is soothing.