Will Bunch: In Haverford, 80-somethings and 90-somethings take to the road to protest Trump

[highplainsdem]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/senior-citizens-protest-trump-pennsylvania-20250419.html

There’s a first time for everything. Judy Bardes, like most women in the so-called Quiet Generation who went to colleges like her alma mater, Bryn Mawr, in the early 1950s, was never the protesting type.

But on Saturday, Bardes — who’s 93, “almost 94″ — joined about 85 other residents of the Quadrangle senior community in suburban Haverford who lined a stretch of Darby Road near the front gate. The protesters, the bulk of whom were in their 80s, were voicing their fury at the growing authoritarianism of the Donald Trump presidency, joining a nationwide protest called “No Kings!”

“Our democracy is at stake and whatever it takes to bring it back to a democracy rather than a dictatorship, I’m willing to work to participate,” Bardes, who grew up in Elkins Park and eventually worked supporting local philanthropies, told me, as passing cars honked loudly in support of the protest.

She carried a sign that was anything but mild-mannered: “Stop the Gestapo! !Bring [Kilmar Abrego] Garcia Home!” — urging the release of the Salvadoran refugee whom U.S. immigration agents mistakenly put on a deportation flight and sent to a notorious gulag in his native country. A regular reader of The Inquirer and the New York Times and a nightly watcher of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, the nonagenarian said she’s horrified by Abrego Garcia’s treatment and called the Trump regime’s insistence that he can’t be brought back “a lot of malarkey.”

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[struggle4progress]

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