If you ever walk around Hanover on Friday afternoons, you’re probably well aware of the group of local Upper Valley residents that collect on the sidewalks at the four way intersection between Wheelock Street and Main Street. There’s usually about 30-40 of them, and they stand quietly with a variety of anti-Trump signs. For a podcast that I am making for a class, my groupmates and I visited last week’s protests and talked to the leader of the protests as well as a handful of participants. Dartmouth students urgently need to hear what they told us in an hour and a half of conversations.
There are a couple of things that are remarkable about this group of middle-aged to senior protesters. Firstly, they’ve staged the same protest with the same intentions at the same time in the same place every Friday since February. Most of the people we talked to estimated that they had been to upwards of 20 of these demonstrations in Hanover alone. That’s almost a full day of standing on the same sidewalk, delivering the same message. The other thing that seemed to make no sense to us when we embarked on this project was that they showed no sign of slowing down, despite there being no discernable change as a product of their protesting. Trump has continued to roll out policy straight out of an authoritarian playbook. Much to the dismay of protestors, the Trump administration couldn’t care less about a group of a couple dozen people who were never going to vote for him standing on a streetcorner in a deep blue district. In fact, if you made a list of the administration's priorities, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Hanover protests were the very last thing. So, why do they persist?
The organizer of these demonstrations is named Deborah Nelson. She is a retired school teacher and the chair of the Hanover/Lyme town Democratic Committee. She told us that when Trump got re-elected, organizing something like the weekly protests wasn’t a choice, but a way to maintain her sanity. When my group partners and I asked her if she ever had any doubts, or ever thought that her efforts might just be pointless, she had a firm answer ready. She said that she knew the protests did something for her: they affirmed that the dark moment we are in right now isn’t changing her. She is still able to maintain hope — and is still taking action.
We received the same response when we asked almost every other protester. They told us that it didn’t matter much if they affected actual change, and simply that they felt they had a duty to stand up and say that something is wrong when something is, in their eyes, clearly wrong.
There was something else that the demonstrators all asked us. Simply put, where are the young people? Many of them reminded us that a young generation of protesters managed to single handedly turn the tide on the Vietnam War through protests and agitation. They expressed a deep sense of alarm that not a single student had come to join them on Friday afternoons.
As much as I detest being reprimanded by people my senior, their question is a striking and damning one. It seems like our neighbors in the Upper Valley have something that many of us have completely lost. The ability — perhaps the gall — to believe in impossible things. To believe that standing on a street corner for 26 weeks in a row might not just be a fruitless endeavor, and might produce some good for the world, no matter how insignificant it seems. To believe that sometimes, doing something in the interest of the greater good might just be good on its own, even if it isn’t expected to bring about anything significant.
We asked the protesters another question, mainly out of a deep desire that they might be able to help us: What gives you hope? Almost all of them gave us a variation of the same answer –– being among people who also care, talking and sharing the same space.
So, although it may be hard, I want to try to believe in impossible things. I think you should too. That’s why I’m going to try to stop by the protests this afternoon. They run from 4:00 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. every Friday at that four way intersection that we’re all so familiar with. I hope I’ll see you there.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
Eli Moyse ’27 is an opinion editor and columnist for The Dartmouth. He studies government and creative writing. He publishes various personal work under a pen name on Substack (https://substack.com/@wesmercer), and you can find his other work in various publications.
