About 80 Durango-area residents gathered at Buckley Park in Durango to raise their collective voices for the International Women’s Day March on Saturday.
The group set out from Buckley Park at 1 p.m. for a march through downtown.
Fort Lewis College students, Indivisible Durango members, federal workers and impassioned residents waved signs with slogans such as “Deport Musk,” “Vote Like Your Kids Live Here” and “Stop Stealing from the Poor to Benefit the Rich.”
Durango resident and march organizer Elli Morris said pedestrians going about their day joined the group as it looped through downtown back to Buckley Park.
“I hosted it for people to have an opportunity to show our collective voices for any issues that are affecting the people that we love or the lands and water that they love,” she said.
She said she is not a member of any organization, and the march, which is usually formally organized by activist groups, was completely grassroots on Saturday.
“There wasn’t a Women’s Day March in Durango. I was surprised,” she said. “I contacted various people, and the ones that are usually pulling together these events are all out of town. So I thought, well, here we go. And I just stepped up ... so that we could all fight back.”
Durango residents Mike and Terry Woodrow said they were marching on Saturday to stand up for federal workers and public lands.
Federal workers in Southwest Colorado and across the country find themselves under the thumb of President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” that has already resulted in firings and threatens the jobs of thousands of federal workers in the name of increasing productivity and curtailing reckless government spending.
“He’s totally illegitimate. He doesn’t care about anything but his own interests. I think he’s a very, very dangerous man,” Mike said about Musk. “If, when things settle down, he will find himself in a very bad place. You can’t do the things he’s doing without building a tremendous amount of backlash.”
He said he’s worried the U.S. is becoming a lawless country, and Musk plays a major role in that.
“You lose that, you lose everything,” he said.
A federal employee for the U.S. Forest Service in Southwest Colorado who attended the Women’s March in Durango said they received over 30 emails from Musk and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
They declined to identify themselves for fear of retaliation, saying, “You don’t know how bad it is.”
At first, they and their colleagues thought Musk’s emails were phishing attempts.
“We never get an email that just says ‘from OPM,’ and so that was very odd. And then I started hearing what was really happening: that he (Musk) had brought his own private server into the Office of Personnel Management, and then was kind of making sure he could push one button and hit all employees at one time,” they said.
They said people who were fired received no severance pay.
“The scariest thing is just not knowing what’s coming next, because they’ve proven that they will go above and beyond any law that’s on the books,” they said. “When they come out with an executive order and then later it just disappears off the website, you start to wonder, do we have any laws at all?”
They said the idea of Musk, a private citizen, making demands and issuing orders to federal workers via email is “ridiculous.” Why should workers even bother to respond, they asked.
Upper management and bosses at the U.S. Forest Service in Southwest Colorado were caught just as off guard and don’t know how to respond or what to tell their employees, they said.
“It’s absolutely demoralizing,” they said. “... You can’t be head of a company and then go out in public and then talk bad about your people who you supposedly hired and were happy with at the time. You can’t call them fat and lazy and stupid and that they’re unproductive. You know, they were wanting us to quit so that we can be in a better, more productive job. They wanted us to leave government, to go for more productive work. And you’re sitting there going, ‘Well, what am I doing if I’m not doing productive work? Why am I here?’”
cburney@durangoherald.com
