BRATTLEBORO-It was a brutally cold day, just after a snowstorm and very windy under cloudy skies. With sidewalks barely cleared in Brattleboro, one might've wondered why anyone would go to town that day.
No matter: We're Vermonters. In groups of two or three - sometimes more - people gathered up and down the sidewalk in front of Centre Congregational Church at noon on Monday, Feb. 17, for the National Day of Protest March.
The march through downtown - part of a grassroots effort on Presidents Day to draw attention to the rapid changes and chaos of the new administration of President Donald Trump - drew more than 300 citizens, an array of signage, and palpable energy.
After some bull-horned opening remarks by one of the march organizers, M.D. Baker, and invocations by Rev. Scott Couper of Centre Congregational Church, the march inched down Main Street looking for safe footings and road crossings, to end at the Brattleboro Food Co-op's gathering plaza for brief addresses and coalescing chants.
The more people who showed up, the wider the range of issues emerged on signs they carried - some scribbled on cardboard, others carefully painted. The verbiage of some was heady and serious; of others, witty.
Some of the signs protested Trump himself, along with Elon Musk, the richest person in the world whom Trump has put in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). One sign - a favorite - read, "Bad Doge."
The signs spoke of concerns around diversity, equity, and inclusion, racism, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights - causes that are hardly unexpected in a march in Brattleboro pushing back against a Republican president.
But with a far-right agenda in play on the national stage and the bloodbath of firings of government employees doing work that many of us consider essential, many of the other march participants held signs that illustrated a broader, less partisan pushback.
The themes were distinctly American: religious freedom, loss of jobs, endangered education, freedom of expression, the erosion of the U.S. Constitution, the imperiling of democracy.
In a few short weeks, the United States has abruptly entered uncharted territory - to the point where a march like this one is attracting seasoned activists to people newly energized and looking to make change.
Energized by the march, I wondered about this new mix of local people, how they are perceiving the rapidly changing political landscape of the United States, and how citizens at the local level can respond to what's unfolding in Washington, D.C.
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In their late 20s, Jon Benney and Lucy Pullan shed light on their generation's position. Having moved to the area a year and a half ago, they were able to buy a house and escape from the Boston life. He's a paraeducator, and she works remotely in sales.
They have not yet integrated themselves fully into the community.
"We didn't know there was a march happening [on Feb. 17]. We're not yet connected to the right people in the community to be a voice of change or resistance," Pullen says.
But they're eager to get to that place and to coalesce.
New to the idea of activism, Benney says, "Yeah, we've tried to not think about it in the past. And now we're getting to the point where we don't want to do that anymore."
Pullen adds: "We've done small things like the Women's March, but we've never been consistently involved in something, and that's what we're looking for."
Of the hurdles their generation has faced, "I feel like our whole lives have just been this existential trauma. Not just us personally, but our generation [...]; we haven't been able to do much on our own and so [...] now we'd love to be able to [be active]," Benney says.
"I just think a lot of people in the younger generations feel a little bit checked out," he observes.
"I think burnt out," Pullen adds.
"There's always been this looming threat: everything's corrupt; everything's broken; the climate's destroyed," Benney continues, noting that "it's kind of hard" for the couple's generation "to find the issues that they're specifically going to jump on or be passionate about."
"It's too big," he says. "Where do I start?"
Thus, the couple feels grateful to be "in a smaller area where we kind of can get our foot in the door."
"It's difficult," Pullen adds, "and I know that the Trump administration purposely does it this way, but it's difficult to grab on to one instance and protest against something very specific, because it's just like this revolving door. There are so many issues, and it's hard to pay attention to all of them or narrow in on just one."
When asked if they could narrow their own concerns, Benney starts.
"My mom's side of the family is Jewish," he says, noting that the new presidential administration's edicts on immigration with raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and on gender identity with executive orders that overtly reject and erase transgender people "just reeks of Nazi Germany."
Seeing that comparison, Benney concludes his top three issues are LGBTQ+ rights, immigration rights, and the preservation of democracy.
Pullen resonates with the LGBTQ+ rights "because my dad's gay and he admitted to me [...] there might be a time under this administration where he won't feel comfortable walking outside with his husband," she says.
Her other causes: women's rights - for choice and freedom - and the protection of democracy.
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George Carvill is resurrecting Windham County Action Network (WeCAN), a Facebook page and email blast that aims to serve as a clearinghouse for local action initiatives.
WeCAN started eight years ago and remained active during the four years of the first Trump administration, but "the need lessened and the group went dormant," he says.
"I'm just trying to resurrect it, essentially," Carvill says. "I'll be publishing stuff that's sent to me. The focus is letting people know about vigils, protests, or similar actions that are going on that they might want to participate in, showing people ways they can make themselves be heard, if that's what they want."
On the WeCAN Facebook page is a link there to a form to fill out, or "they could contact me directly at [email protected]."
"I think people are pretty galvanized, but what I have heard sometimes is people saying, 'Oh, that was a great vigil on Saturday: I wish I had known about it so that I could have gone,'" Carvill says.
Baker says that she and the other organizers of the march are planning another soon.
"We got such a great turnout because people are upset and want to do something," she says.
And with WeCAN back up and running, this time they'll get more notice. (The group's activities will also be posted on the nascent grassroots group 50501 - 50 protests, 50 states, one movement - which blossomed on Reddit in February.)
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Dan DeWalt, area musician, woodworker, restorative justice practitioner, teacher, and a leader of the Feb. 17 march, talks of mission and of the urgent need to defend the nation and the U.S. Constitution.
"It's as simple as that. And that's why we can't just complain about what [Trump] does," the seasoned activist says.
"We have to make them react to us, because he is a juggernaut that has everybody flummoxed right now and not knowing what to do," he adds.
A proponent of a nationwide strike and of tax resistance, DeWalt speaks of this Friday's Economic Blackout Day, which calls on Americans to avoid any economic activity.
Such a "massive jolt" would get the president's attention "in a way that he knows we have more power than he does," DeWalt says.
"We're facing a takeover of the government, and a trashing of the Constitution, and an ending of the equal branches of government," he says. "So that requires some sacrifice on our part."
DeWalt acknowledges that "we might lose a day's work. We might lose some money. We might have somebody beat us up."
But, he says, "There's a revolution going on, and if we're going to fight to save the republic, there's a certain risk in doing that because we're up against a very massively wealthy and criminally-minded enterprise."
The alternative to taking these risks and just "keeping our heads down," DeWalt cautions, is that "we'll soon see what it's like to live under a dictatorship […]."
He urges people to engage with others of differing positions - "people [who] aren't used to working with people who aren't exactly like them" - to find some common ground to "fight an oligarchy, a cabal of superbillionaires who are financing the Heritage Foundation" - the political think tank that authored Project 2025, a vision for much of the radical change that the new administration has unleashed in its first weeks.
"These are really extraordinary times and extraordinary circumstances," he says.
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Isaac Evans-Frantz, executive director of Action Corps - a "nonpartisan grassroots initiative to build power in solidarity with people around the world," sees the times through the lens of his work.
Born in Brattleboro, where he is a candidate for Selectboard, Evans-Frantz has been involved in rights and justice issues since he served on the Vermont State Board of Education while a student at Brattleboro Union High School.
He worked in New York City in various jobs, including community health care, and soon started volunteering with Oxfam America and the Humanitarian Relief and Development Organization.
He then started Action Corps, which he runs from Brattleboro. He returned to town with his husband five years ago.
The mission of the nonpartisan, apolitical human rights, humanitarian advocacy organization is to "champion justice in solidarity with people most affected by climate disasters and violent conflict. We campaign for U.S. policies to save lives around the world," according to its website.
The organization, which works on enforcement of U.S. policy and U.S. law pertinent to U.S. foreign policy, organized what Evans-Frantz described as the largest anti-war demonstration in the world against an "unconstitutional war on Yemen" on former President Joe Biden's "first Monday in office."
"Where I see the real opportunity is on these Constitutional issues," he says. "Where the president has been talking about taking over Canada and Greenland and Panama - you know, this is ridiculous, this sort of imperialism."
He adds that "it's real clear in the Constitution that it's the U.S. Congress that has the power to declare war, not the president."
And Evans-Frantz says that reaffirming these absolutes vis-à-vis congressional power is the focus of his work which, he notes "is not new, but the challenges are."
"This is an unprecedented challenge in terms of just the total disregard for the rule of law," he says. "We'd seen that disregard [..] by the Biden White House, but we are seeing widespread, flagrant disregard with this current administration."
As for the slashing of the U.S. Agency for International Development, "that's illegal," he says.
"It's a violation of the separation of powers […] because Congress controls the purse strings of the United States. Congress has appropriated those funds and for the administration to withhold them and not allow that funding forward is a violation of the Constitution," Evan-Frantz says.
The issue, he asserts, is getting "Congress to stand up for the law and to mobilize citizens broadly to that end."
Noting recent nationwide demonstrations, even back to the 2017 Women's March, Evans-Frantz reflects that "these were massive, and it was important that people were showing up. We want to see more of that and more building on the grassroots level."
"But in terms of specific issues, it's going to be important for people to continue doing the advocacy [they've been doing]," he says.
Evans-Frantz predicts that the U.S. will "be likely to see that the Trump administration will disregard judicial orders."
Then what?
"It's going to be really important for American people to make a lot of noise and to really stand up, to say 'no' and to really draw the line there," he says. "We are the last defense."
That said, he adds: "We should compel our elected members of Congress to use their power."
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Jeff Lewis, former executive director of the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation and a current member of St. Michael's Episcopal Church and the co-founder of its refugee ministry, has some things to say about the administration's policies on religious freedom.
"What got our attention was an executive order from the White House titled, 'Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,' [which seemed] a pretty direct support of a particular type of Christianity," he said.
Lewis calls the centering of conservative evangelicalism an insult to the nation's Christian heritage and "a blow to all other religions," listing Judaism, Buddhism, Bahá'ís, and Islam as examples.
"And that felt, first, un-American, and secondly, [...] just wrong," he says. "It's not where we've grown up, where we think the U.S. Constitution is, where we think the country is, or where the country needs to be."
So he and fellow parishioner Judy Davidson have begun to engage St. Michael's Episcopal in conversation "to understand what it means and what's being said about us."
At the first meeting, a Zoom session, nearly 30 people showed up, in general "quite passionate about what brought them there with a wide range of motivations [...] from very personal ones to kind of Constitutional ones, and a wide variety of Christian commitment from very early-stage believers to people who've been part of a church for their whole lives."
"So we're trying to feel what we as a church community can do," Lewis says.
He appreciates the creativity in the march and the other examples of people "feeling their way to try and figure out what they feel they need to do, what they can do, both physically and politically, and where they think they can have some impact."
And that takes time to "observe what's happening, think about what the options are, and craft a strategy," he says. "That isn't going to happen in a few days."
Casting a wider net, Lewis adds, "There's a fairly broad reaction across the United States in a lot of different areas, some very specific."
Some examples? Refugees. The transgender community. Indigenous groups. And farmers in the Midwest, "who are saying, 'Hey, I voted for you and you just shut off USAID, which was a lot of my business. I was selling my product to them to be used to feed people. And now it's going to rot in my field. What are you doing?'" Lewis says.
He says he also sees signs of interfaith action emerging.
"All Souls Unitarian and the area Jewish community held gatherings in early February to address the situation," Lewis says.
"On Feb. 9, they invited State Rep. Michael Mrowicki to share his presentation on Christian Nationalism. We saw Monday that the march took off from Centre Congregational Church."
Its pastor, Scott Couper, "was front and center, talking in his robe and clearly demonstrating that that congregation was engaged," Lewis says.
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Abby Mnookin, community volunteer and an educator with the Vermont Wilderness School, volunteers with Jewish Voice for Peace, with area mutual aid, with the area's rapid response team, with area schools, and with Youth for Change, which operates out of The Root Social Justice Center.
"This feels like a moment where we're really going to have to be all hands on deck everywhere at all moments, but we can't do that realistically," she says. "So I am focusing primarily on local and state work; I feel like if there's a big call for national actions, I am interested in joining."
One such action: an economic blackout on Friday, Feb. 28 - another grassroots movement to send a message to large corporations, many of which have been at least nominally supportive of Trump's agenda.
"I feel like I'm interested in taking part in calls where it's organized, but I like doing that locally," says Mnookin, who adds that she's "keeping [her] ears to the ground for ways that it makes sense to engage at the national level."
That involves calling Vermont's legislative delegation: U.S. Rep. Becca Balint and U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch.
"It feels like a moment where there's going to be more and more reliance on local everything, because to me it just feels like our structures of government are collapsing," she says. "So we can't rely on the same federal and maybe even state-like scaffolding that we have been."
At 48, Mnookin thinks in her generational cohort ("Generation X"), "there's a lot of disillusionment and despair, and so folks are kind of struggling for footholds[…]."
"Some people that I've talked to it just feels like they've given up all hope in governmental systems and engagement and just don't feel like it's been worth it for a while," she says. "And there are others who [say] this is the system we're in, and we've got to work within it to make the change."
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Meg Mott, professor of politics emerita of Marlboro College, Emerson College, and Keene State College, reflects on precedent, on the U.S. Constitution, and on a call to action.
"Since the country started, the executive branch has wanted to exceed the authority that's actually given to it," says the Constitutional scholar from Putney.
Citing examples of actions of presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama and others, she notes a legacy of frustration around the U.S. Congress not acting as the president wishes.
In those cases, presidents wanting to effect change have turned to executive actions that deliberately bypass the checks and balances built into our system of government.
Historically, sometimes such actions to bypass Congress have been popular - they are, after all, a president's agenda.
But Mott notes that the current situation is different.
Recent polling, she observes, "is showing that the American public is not liking the slash-and-burn approach" in the form of the Trump administration's addressing government reform with a chainsaw - a motif that Elon Musk has embraced.
"It turns out we are a norm-loving people," she says.
On the upside, Mott says, the judiciary is acting intelligently.
"They're acting like jurists and not just partisan hacks," she says.
And looking at the executive branch, she praised Hagan Scotten, who resigned as assistant United States attorney of the Southern District of New York over the Trump administration's sudden demand to seek dismissal of the SDNY's federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
In his resignation letter to Emil Bove, acting deputy attorney general, Scotten - notably, a Republican - wrote, "If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me."
Can we count on the Supreme Court to behave with similar judicial integrity?
"I think so," Mott says. "I don't think they're going to be very sympathetic to any argument that says the executive branch controls the other two branches."
In terms of where average citizens can place energy toward action, Mott paraphrases Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.
"We've had a great decline in people participating in clubs" and other community activities, Mott says, and one of the simplest and most effective courses of action one can take is reversing this trend.
She says that Putnam found that in the communities where there was a vibrancy of group involvement also had less corruption in government.
It became easy during the pandemic to just stay in, stay safe, watch another movie, and it's hard to change that script, Mott acknowledges, stressing the need to shift the paradigm and become involved.
She sees community activities (e.g., community theater) as essential.
"Just watching each other take on different roles," she says. "That's amazing."
For a primer about the U.S. Constitution, she recommends Yuval Levin's American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation - and Could Again.
"I like him because his basic point is that the Constitution helps us disagree better," Mott says.
Unlike most other countries, she says, the U.S. Constitution embraces a higher law and allows for ambiguity and disagreement.
While other nations have "a long administrative code book," the United States' guiding document is "much more philosophical," Mott says.
"It's not going to tell you what to do," she says. "It's not going to be so prescriptive. It's going to ask us to think analogically."
There is "more good in our Constitution than bad," Mott asserts. "There is enough good in these words that abolitionists" were able to convince Southern slaveholders that slavery - "the worst of the worst" - should be overturned.
"And the words didn't have to change," she says. With amendments, the core text "got stronger."
How strong is the U.S. Constitution?
Mott observes that "France has had five constitutions in the time that we've had one."
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This News column by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.