93-year-old holds a "STOP THE GESTAPO" protest sign in haverford, PA

[orleans]

In Haverford, 80-somethings and 90-somethings take to the road to protest Trump
They saw the Holocaust, WWII and Vietnam, and these senior protesters on Philly's Main Line have seen enough of Trump.



Judy Bardes, a 93-year-old resident of the Quadrangle senior community in Haverford, joined about 85 other residents along Darby Road on Saturday to protest Donald Trump's presidency.
Will Bunch

There’s a first time for everything. Judy Bardes, like most women in the so-called Quiet Generation who went to colleges like her alma mater, Bryn Mawr, in the early 1950s, was never the protesting type.

But on Saturday, Bardes — who’s 93, “almost 94″ — joined about 85 other residents of the Quadrangle senior community in suburban Haverford who lined a stretch of Darby Road near the front gate. The protesters, the bulk of whom were in their 80s, were voicing their fury at the growing authoritarianism of the Donald Trump presidency, joining a nationwide protest called “No Kings!”
“Our democracy is at stake and whatever it takes to bring it back to a democracy rather than a dictatorship, I’m willing to work to participate,” Bardes, who grew up in Elkins Park and eventually worked supporting local philanthropies, told me, as passing cars honked loudly in support of the protest.

“This is the first time I’ve been able to put myself, my body, into a protest,” Bardes said, on an unusually balmy April afternoon. “It’s still scary to think what I’m fighting against.”

snip

“Our generation experienced World War II, and we experienced and know of the Nazis,” Reiss said. “And we are traveling right down that same road that Hitler did in Germany, and Trump is doing to us now, and it’s so reprehensible to us to see it happening to our glorious nation.”
Her last words were nearly drowned out by another beeping car horn, a suburban salute to a generation that can no longer stay silent.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/senior-citizens-protest-trump-pennsylvania-20250419.html

no paywall link: https://archive.is/fYGno#selection-633.0-690.0

[sheshe2]

1. Bless her.

She knows.

“And we are traveling right down that same road that Hitler did in Germany,

Persist. Resist.

[blue-wave]

2. You beat me too it

Yes, bless her.

[sheshe2]

4. Love ya, blue-wave.

[usonian]

3. Old folks rule!

We saw it all. Civil Rights and Vietnam.

No tolerance for the wannabe mob boss Mousselini.

[calimary]

5. God Bless You, Judy Bardes!

Still vigilant after all these years! You’re an excellent example for us all!

[soldierant]

6. People in their nineties and late eighties -

even if they were not old enough to serve in the military were definitely old enough to have seen news articles and newsreels. I imagine the newsreels made a huge impression.

I wasn;t born till between VE and VJ days, but I had a good education and did a lot of reading on my own as well. Strange though it may sound, if one (and especially a young and impressionable one) read British cozy mysteries written in the late 30s and 40s, one got a real sense of how it felt to be on the home front of a war which was virtually next door.

[UpInArms]

7. I am so very proud of her