On April 25, around 40 people gathered near Kendrick Park and the Amherst rotary with signs and bells for the “Hands Off Our Students” standout at 4 p.m. This was their third week gathering near the rotary, where traffic picked up on Friday afternoons to show up for their community, co-organizer Jill Buchanan said.

Buchanan is a part of Indivisible West Quabbin, a national grassroots movement consisting of thousands of local groups with “a mission to push back against the Trump regime and support the growth of a healthy democracy by and for the people.” The movement includes the towns Shutesbury, Leverett, New Salem, Wendell and other communities.

Buchanan said that this stand out was the group’s third one, with previous two standouts garnering crowds of 40 and 100 people.

A new member, Lisa Hallstrom, is a retired Smith College professor. Hallstrom joined West Quabbin because she wanted to meet with neighbors and do something locally to support the nationwide “Hands Off” movement. Though this was her first time at this stand out, Hallstrom said she participated in the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War movement and the Women’s Rights movement.

“I spent my whole life … fighting for justice … and I just can’t bear what’s going on in our country,” Hallstrom said. “I feel like there’s no democracy here right now. So I feel like, at 79 years old, with children and grandchildren, I feel like I have to stand up.”

Hallstrom added that she came to stand up for international students and to resist the current administration.

Rachael Hayes, the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst, also attended her first stand out. “It’s time to show support for our students and let them know that they’re part of our community, that we stand up for them,” Hayes said. “And it’s a time for all of us to have our values in the public.”

Buchanan spoke into a megaphone about Indivisible West Quabbin’s belief in democracy and fighting fascism, and how it was part of a nationwide movement to resist President Donald Trump, emphasizing that those attending the rally were standing in solidarity with international students and immigrants.

Buchanan encouraged people to look for other stand outs, to stay involved and to keep putting pressure on the government “to protect our neighbors and our valued community members.”

Across the rotary was another cluster of similar demonstrators. Dix McComas is a retired professor of English literature who grew up with a minister father in a deeply religious family. He said that his brother is a Trump supporter in Kentucky, the state he grew up in, which solidly voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections.

McComas said that education changed his life and gave him the opportunity to meet people he would not have met if he stayed in Kentucky. He said that he noticed a nostalgia growing among some of his generation — the baby boomers — and that that nostalgia was a warning sign.

McComas said that it was during this “nostalgic” time that Black people were excluded from neighborhoods like the one he grew up in.

“If we’re nostalgic for the 50s, watch out,” McComas said. “Because it’s this nostalgia that excludes.”

This current period struck McComas with the same fear that he felt during the Columbine school shootings in 1999 and when the twin towers fell during the terrorist attacks in 2001. He felt angry, upset and powerless, but he went to a rally in Northampton a week prior and felt revitalized.

“I need to participate,” McComas said. “Because just to take in information and not be able to do anything about it … that kind of discrepancy between horrible information and the inability to act … can make you crazy. So, I went there and I came home and I was like, ‘I think this is the best thing I’ve done in a long time.’”

Buchanan says that showing up for the community tells the students that they are seen, and it shows where their values are. Buchanan adds that it “normalizes the fact that … protesting is our constitutional right.”

Indivisible West Quabbin will hold its next stand out on Friday, May 2, near Kendrick Park.

Grace Chai can be reached at [email protected].