Where Kindness Holds the Line

The Importance of Small Town Resistance

When I scroll through Flipboard or glance at YouTube, the protests I see are always the same cities: Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle. Over and over again, the media loops the footage of clashes in those big, familiar places.

But what I don’t see—what they don’t show—are the protests springing up in small-town America.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re happening. Right here in my own mountain town, with fewer than 20,000 people in the whole surrounding area, I’ve seen plenty of them. There have been marches, civil disobedience actions, even the quiet rebellion of stickers slapped on light poles and signs—anti-fascist messages dotting the landscape. Some days I half-joke that maybe Antifa headquarters is tucked away in the hills, where no one’s looking.

The problem is the narrative. They want you to think that protests are only a big-city phenomenon, the work of so-called angry, violent, lawless urban crowds. That the “real” Americans in the mom-and-pop shops, the apple pie kitchens, and the quiet mountain towns are just fine with what’s going on—that we’re docile, silent, content.

But that’s a lie. I can tell you from here, from where I stand: small-town America is not asleep.

Maybe the real problem is that nobody’s here to cover it. Nobody’s documenting what small-town resistance looks like. Corporate media has gutted local affiliates, folding them into regional hubs until there’s nothing left on the ground. In our area, we don’t even have a television station anymore. Cable access—the quirky, homespun lifeline of small communities—has been shuttered and tossed onto the trash heap of “things that once were.”

Radio? Thinned out, consolidated. What we get now comes from Sacramento or San Francisco, not from here.

The Union Democrat, our lone local newspaper, is hanging on by a thread. More ads than news, and what news does survive is shallow: a rundown of city council minutes, a box score from the high school basketball game, maybe a summer feature on the fair or the farmers’ market. They wouldn’t dare touch national news. They wouldn’t dare touch local events that brush against national conversations, not for all the tea in China.

And that’s part of it: without legitimate news sources amplifying these voices, how is anyone supposed to know? How are people in Portland or Philly supposed to realize that their brothers and sisters in the Sierra foothills—or in towns scattered across Kansas, Iowa, Alabama—are standing up too? We’ve been left without a megaphone, and the silence gets mistaken for compliance.

So maybe once again the onus is on us. We, the people, have to amplify our own voices. Nobody’s going to swoop in with cameras and satellite trucks. It’s time for us to document what we see in our small towns. And today’s television? That’s the internet—the endless scroll where people burn hours a day. That’s where our stories can break through.

It doesn’t take thousands. Even if it’s just three people on a corner with a hand-painted sign that says No Kings—ask them why they’re there. Film it, post it, share it. It matters. Because those voices, multiplied, tell a truer story than any cable feed.

I’ll go out on a limb here: I’d rather hear from a farmer who plants an anti-Trump sign in his field than from another polished pundit. I’d rather hear from a mother in a small town whose son was snatched up by ICE despite being an American citizen. Those are the voices we need to amplify, the ones we need to make viral. That’s the message small-town America needs to send: we are not asleep. We are not compliant. We will roar.

So here’s my challenge. If you live in a small town—start documenting it. Start posting your videos, your photos, your stories. And if you’re in a big city, take a drive out into the country. Find a No Kings protest in Altoona or Ames or Akron, and lift up those voices too.

It’s time to put the small stories alongside the big ones. It’s time for small-town America to break the sound barrier with our discontent—and remind the world that resistance lives everywhere.