There were patriots from an OP retirement community out on their walkers protesting | Opinion
When Donald Trump says protesters “hate our country,” he could not be more wrong.
Outside a retirement community in Overland Park on Saturday, where several dozen residents had come out to make their “No Kings” views known, I met Mike Davies, an 86-year-old military veteran who served during the Berlin Crisis that ended when the wall went up in 1961. He voted for Trump, he said, yet here he was sitting out along Metcalf Avenue in the blazing midday sun in his wheelchair, holding a “Dump Trump” sign. So what changed his mind?
Only “everything he does; he’s been doing a lot of bad things.” But especially, Davies said, “I didn’t like the thing of the money dropping” — of the peril that he sees Trump putting our economy in. Davies was wearing an “If you love your freedom, thank a vet” ballcap with a “Lest we forget” poppy pin on it. But I did not need that prompt to take my hat off to him, and did.
My dad’s highest compliment was to call someone a great American, and another great American I met at this protest was 79-year-old Genie May, the first white nurse and midwife at an all-Black hospital in Columbia, SC. She delivered 75 babies all on her own during her first year on the job. The first time she protested was in 1966, “because we couldn’t get supplies or equipment. There was one little white face protesting.”
That place, the Harden Street Division of the Columbia Hospital, is “no longer in existence, thank God,” she said, but can you imagine all May saw and did and learned there, and all the care for others not like herself that she has carried through her life as a result? She also protested for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, until she married a soldier who was sent to Vietnam and so had to stop. Hates America? Just the opposite.
She’s a long, longtime advocate for those with disabilities. Her husband is part Native American, and he has been known to remind those with anti-immigrant impulses where they fit into the whole “if only you had come here with papers” scenario.
Lifelong DAR member: ‘This is not America’
Also waving a sign around — hers said “ICE melts under resistance” — was Gayle Hathorne, a lifelong DAR member and proud organizer of a chapter. As a younger woman, she played French horn in the Berlin Philharmonic, and at 71, she is confident that her ancestor who fought in the Battles of Lexington and Concord did not put his life on the line so that our current president could “disassemble everything they fought for.” Recently, she says, she was kicked off of Facebook for posting, “No Trump parade.”
“This is not America,” she said, and “the media has been downgraded, so people don’t even know what’s going on,” or believe facts even if they happen upon them. “It numbs the mind,” she said, that a convicted felon is threatening Social Security. All of these things, “are why I’m here today. Showing up always counts.” It sure does.
JoAnn McNamara, the organizer of the retirement home protest of 43 in all, including several relatives and friends, and two people who stopped on their way to other, larger protests because they thought it looked “awesome,” said it wasn’t hard to turn out her neighbors, including some Republicans: “A lot of people really don’t like what’s going on.” For her, the worst of the worst is the treatment of innocent migrants. I also met an 82-year-old who first protested at the Kentucky Capitol as a college student and now is the grandmother of a transgender girl who wants her to be OK, and a Mizzou grad who has been following Trump since the 50s and has never seen anything he liked.
The sacrifice and service of these elders
These are some hardy folks who have lived through a thing or three.
Their collective contributions, the sacrifice and service of all kinds from these elders standing along one single, random block in Overland Park, Kan., so outshine those of Trump’s entire cabinet of former TV personalities that it’s kind of embarrassing, but also inspiring, because this too is who we are.
People who do not base all human interactions on what they can get from one another are outside Trump’s understanding. That’s why he assumes that to disagree with him is to hate America. But he is not America. And to disagree is not to hate.
Showing up still does matter, and lifetimes of quiet, too often uncelebrated contributions to the common good do, too. Even if knocking over the other kid’s sand castle seems like the thing to do right now, does that seem like it has made the most powerful man in the world happy?
I felt so lifted up by the wisdom of these senior protesters in Overland Park.
The shows of disproportionate and aggressive force on the streets of Los Angeles and of tanks on the streets of D.C. do not have that effect, and I only wish the millions wasted on Trump’s birthday party had instead been spent to get back some of the 83,000 employees of Veterans Affairs he just threw out the window. I keep thinking that if only little Donald had gotten the birthday he needed as a kid, it would never have come to this.
The political assassinations in Minnesota made this a tragic day. But the protests across the country said that we still want the law to be king. And those men and women on Metcalf Avenue, who have lived through and given so much, and still aren’t finished, embody the America that I choose to hold onto now.
This story was originally published June 15, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
