Bloomfield residents and local citizens coalesced Saturday afternoon, April 5, as other communities did across the nation, to protest actions by the recently installed federal administration of President Donald Trump.
There were a myriad of objections fueling the hubbub expressed on hand-held signs and the responses of protesters gathered at the municipal building who, moving to nearby Bloomfield Avenue, were heralded by passing car horns.
The event, monikered “Hands Off,” was a public calling out of what has been perceived as the questionable practice of the upheaval or outright termination of bureaucratic norms and safeguards, by President Trump.
The president had established an agency, the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, and charged it, and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to find and eliminate wasteful spending and perceived fraud in federal government agencies.
On Saturday, a considerable number of the American populace said they had had enough with DOGE, Musk and the president’s flaunting of unfavorable judicial decisions. In Bloomfield, an organizer of the township event, Ted Glick, speaking from the steps of the municipal building, conjured the revolutionary spirit of 1776 with the words of a firebrand of that distant crisis, Thomas Paine, whose words, still recognizable, still resonate.
Quoted Glick, from Paine: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country. But he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered. Yet we have this consolation with us — that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
Others at the event also spoke, to this newspaper, about what brought them out in the rain.
Navy veteran Melody Szadkowski, from Orange, came to the town hall steps.
“Even if I wasn’t a veteran, I’d be here today,” she said. “I have my Navy pension and Social Security, that’s it. And he’s after both of them. I’m petrified. I don’t
know what I’d do because I can’t afford health insurance. I put in 20 years for my country and I think I earned those benefits.”
Szadkowski was in communications and served in Italy, Guam, Japan and San Diego.
Bernice Greene, of East Orange, said she was protesting to defend her Social Security.
“I worked from 16 to 75 and now I’m 82 years old,” she said. “I want hands off my checks. How are we going to live?”
Greene worked in the office of the New Jersey attorney general and did docketing — processing the initial information people, coming to the office for assistance, are required to provide.
Atlas Roughley came from Newark.
“As a young individual in a place with a lot of people of color, the talk is about reopening Delaney Hall, an ICE facility,” Roughley said.. “It’s a for-profit prison. I don’t want my tax money to imprison college students with families.”
U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement, called ICE, is planning to reopen Delaney Hall, in Newark, as an immigrant detention facility which will operate as a for-profit business.
Audrey Grier, of Hawthorne, said she was heartbroken because of “what a lot of people voted for.”
“I want to be a part of what people agree on publicly, what Trump is doing,” she said. “He’s taking away from the nonprofits and food programs, the mass deportations, the ‘us versus them’ spirit and the dehumanizing of people.”
Sue Mullin, of Bloomfield, said she was really scared.
“It’s the Social Security,” she said. “I have a friend with melanoma who lives on Social Security. If she has to go several miles away (for an office) she’s going to have a big problem. She’ll die. She doesn’t have that kind of energy. She doesn’t have that kind of money. Cruelty rules.”
Mullin’s concern is that with the downsizing of government agencies by DOGE, some offices may have to close, leaving fewer offices further away.
On the town hall steps, after quoting Paine, Glick had said that people needed to build up all the positive things thathave happened since the War of Independence.
“That’s what we’re fighting for,” he said.
Later, in a telephone interview, he said the Saturday protest was encouraging.
“The ‘Hands Off’ movement is proposing actions on May 1,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll be taking part in some demonstration. Beyond that, we’re here to bring together the people and determine how we move ahead.”
Protestors tell president ‘Hands Off!’ added by Daniel Jackovino on
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