‘We have six years to get our sh*t together’
A week ago, University of Massachusetts Amherst students held a “Walkout Against Trump” to “protest the environmental implications of the election.”
The Sunrise Movement UMass demonstration, which eventually met up with students from nearby Amherst High School, was emulated by other institutions including the University of Delaware, the University of North Carolina, and Oberlin College, according to the Daily Collegian.
Brendan Post, the coordinator of the environmental group (which was founded seven years by a UMass graduate) twice told those assembled that “things got a lot worse” with Donald Trump’s November 5 election victory.
“We have six years to get our sh*t together, and our president in [a] few months doesn’t believe the climate is changing,” he said.
Post added “We voted, it didn’t work. Now we organize [and] we strike. We need to be strong for each other. We need to build strong communities to check in on each other and be there for each other.”
UMass Student Government Association President Colin Humphries informed the crowd he was elected to “serve and protect” students, stating “I am not [going to] let no one [sic] come to this campus and tell us what is best for our students.”
Ryan Darbhanga, a sophomore economics major and the attorney general for SGA, also spoke to the crowd.
“I want to tell you that I will fight for every single student’s legal rights on this campus, no matter who you are [or] what political affiliation you are,” Darbhanga said. “This is the people’s war, this is our war … I myself have turned so far left and I’m proud of it … once your rights are taken away, there’s no going back.”
“I’m angry; I’m scared,” Julie Powers, an 18-year-old physics major said. “I have friends who are worried about their parents or their grandparents getting deported […] I am scared I won’t be able to get an abortion one day if I ever need to. I know that deep in my soul I feel something’s going to shift if we fight back – if we organize.”
Around 3:20 p.m., just over 20 high schoolers arrived in Amherst Town Center. The group of students left during their final class of the day and walked through downtown Amherst with no faculty member supervision.
Sunrise Newark, U. Delaware’s branch of the group, posted on Instagram regarding the election that “even in the darkest of times, light will return.”
It also posted about a November 20 “Election Post-Mortem Townhall” which features the accompanying graphic:
MORE: Sunrise Movement demands Columbia U. declare a ‘climate emergency’
IMAGES: Photographee.eu/Shutterstock.com; Sunrise Newark/Instagram
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