STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

The day dawned rainy and chilly—hardly a day to be waving a sign at a protest. But, as one person put it, people were “steamed up and ready to go.”

And, so, 150 men, women and children squished together under the picnic shelter at Hop Porter Park Saturday to protest government actions that have included mass firings of federal workers, a massive rollback of environmental policies, cuts to medical research and much more.

“We live in weather—rain doesn’t mean we don’t show up,” said Gini Ballou as she addressed what was one of hundreds of Hands Off! Rallies across the United States that day. “Our next rally is on June 14 and we’re not going away.”

Speakers told the crowd that the current administration is working double time to dismantle American democracy and remove personal safeguards.

Elizabeth Jeffrey, a founder of the local Climate Action Coalition, told the crowd that climate change touches every aspect of people’s lives, creating devastating floods and months-long wildfires, impacting the food we can grow and even the safety of our children and grandchildren.

“Fires like this winter’s Los Angeles fires--the most extensive and expensive fire in U.S. history so far--can take away every one of your possessions in a day and leave toxic waste where the fires’ cinders and ash blow,” she said. “Scientists studying the current trajectory of global heating and its impacts find that the heat and the impacts are compounding one another and coming even faster and stronger than previously predicted.”

Meanwhile, she said, the Trump Administration took more than 140 actions to weaken or rescind environmental rules in its first hundred days while promoting drilling, fracking and burning of fossil fuels and cutting funding already promised for renewable energy development and increasing energy efficiencies.

That included taking away a $59 million grant that the University of Idaho was counting on to help Idaho farmers adopt practices to increase resilience to weather changes and expand into new markets. And it included yanking a $16.4 million grant that Pocatello planned to use to improve sewer lines and sidewalks and provide clean drinking water.

“In its first 100 days, the administration has slashed all environmental agencies and employees and rescinded the rules that lowered pollution levels that have been in place and improved public health over the past 50 years,” Jeffrey said. “It also fired thousands of parks and forest service employees, diminished weather tracking systems, revoked an order protecting old-growth forest and allowed for action to accelerate logging and drilling on more than 100 million acres.

“It is now talking about opening public lands for developing house, by which (Trump) certainly means billionaire’s mansions,” she added.

Audra Serrian, who works for the U.S. Forest Service, said that the Forest Service employees who lost their jobs were not lazy people.

“I work for like $20 an hour…. I love what I do. It’s my dream job,” she said. “And I love my country and the future of our country is at stake. We love our public lands—that’s why we live here…And I’m still working as a public employee because of events like this.”

Ballou said that people need to talk about how they expect the government to serve them. And, she added, that racism needs to be swept back under the floor bed “where it belongs.”

“When you get down to it, how we treat one another is how we stack up as a nation,” she added.

“Today is not about us or them. Today is about we as in ‘we the people,’ ” said Herbert Romero.

Everyone can do something, said Jeffrey, including voting, writing to representatives and joining groups like the Climate Actional Coalition to work with others with the same concerns.

“I have to do the next right thing because how can I do otherwise?” she said. “Let’s see what we can do in the next hundred days”