The first thing to keep in mind is that it’s not a protest, it’s a rally.
At least, that’s what United for America organizer Nancy Berland said when she laid out the details of the event in Haines scheduled for April 5.
The timing of her new group’s rally coincides with a planned national mobilization called the Hands Off protests. Nationally, the group has more than 1,000 events scheduled across the country.
But Berland said she teamed up with seven other people in town who wanted to focus on something different than the national protests.
“A lot of the nationwide rallies are more negative in tone and we didn’t want to have a negative tone,” Berland said. “We wanted to have ours be unique for our town. We didn’t want to bash or trash anything, we wanted to be positive and support things we care about.”
On Saturday at 1 p.m. the group will gather at Third and Main and start off with some music from Tom Heywood and Burl Sheldon. After that, they’ll have short speeches from people who have concerns about how national events might be impacting the Chilkat Valley. Berland didn’t have a confirmed list of speakers as of Monday.
The group plans to march through town.
“We’re asking people if they can bring a sign supporting something that they care about,” she said. “It could be public education, or social security, support for libraries or museums, support for science, justice, civility, or the rule of law.”
Berland said she’s hopeful that people will also bring American or Canadian flags as well. Their message is one of unification and a focus on what they support.
“There’s just so much divisiveness,” she said. “We wanted to support the things that I think the majority of people in this community support and so that was important to us.”
Berland said she was inspired to take action because she has been anxious and upset about what’s happening in Washington, D.C. and she thinks it’s important not to feel isolated during those times. She didn’t want to leave town to participate in a rally somewhere else, so she decided to work on making something happen in Haines.
“We’re Americans and we love our country and we care about what’s happening and we want to come together and kind of have an outlet for, I think, what some people are feeling,” she said. “They’re frustrated and fearful and we wanted to be positive about it so that’s what we chose to do.”