Last Sunday, this editorial board attempted to take stock of the widespread exhaustion and general pandemonium that the ad hoc decisions of the new Trump administration are causing throughout our economy and in our local communities.

The consensus we reached was that to stop bracing for federal austerity and related reform was not a sound or secure way forward — no matter how many false alarms have been endured in recent weeks. Our attention to the cascade of cuts and would-be cuts, and our work to make sense of their real-life effects, needs to be sustained.

Locally, in recent days and weeks, we’ve seen an array of commendable efforts to draw attention to what’s cooking at the federal level. Protests against cuts to public services took place in Portland, Bangor, Augusta and beyond.

Weekend protests against the administration’s actions more generally have taken hold with some regularity in many of our more populous towns and cities. Placards express discontent with the input of unelected agents of reform, tech billionaire Elon Musk chief among them. Others decry the stepped-up activity of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Those rallying together are, in many cases, concerned individuals unconnected by age, occupation or town of residence. People traveled from around Maine to Portland last week to protest the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the permanent U.S. resident and student who was arrested over his involvement in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University. Dozens of people joined a protest in Congress Square in Portland last Sunday, calling on Sen. Susan Collins to host a town hall in Maine — something the senator has not done in years. “Where’s Susan?” was the tagline of a well-attended town hall meeting held in Gorham a few days later.

In other cases, it’s alarm over the seemingly imminent degradation of day-to-day working and living conditions that are driving the organizing. We’re talking, most recently, about actions taken by Maine’s veterans, nurses, postal service workers and teachers.

“People need to know what’s happening, so they can take action on their own,” Tom Smith, legislative director for the Bangor Area Local 536 of the American Postal Workers Union, told Spectrum News last week.

Smith is right about this role, one of the handful of valuable roles that peaceful, informed and informative protest has.

In the case of USPS, it’s a stand taken by carriers against as many as 10,000 layoffs nationwide and the feared path toward potential privatization and the loss of that agency’s independence. Postal workers in Maine are particularly worried about the abandonment of essential services to rural addresses.

For Maine Medical Center nurses and their supporters in Portland last Thursday, it was about federal cuts to Medicaid that they know will be harmful to their patients, endangering them at their most vulnerable.

For veterans, it’s the specter of pulled funding and the cuts to VA jobs. “We didn’t cut our service to you,” read one of the posters at a recent rally by veterans in Augusta. “Chainsaws cripple veterans,” read another, referring to a publicity stunt of the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (not a congressionally authorized department but an initiative). One protester brought along a pitchfork.

For the teachers in Maine and around the country who came together to demonstrate before school last week, it’s about dramatic cuts to the staff of the U.S. Department of Education, carried out with a view to its ultimate elimination (as of last week, per executive order), an unprecedented move that they fear will affect both their ability to do their work and their students’ ability to succeed.

If the unfolding picture has you feeling deeply pessimistic about the state of the nation, it might be easy enough to extend that pessimism to the efficacy of groups of 20 people, 50 people, even 500 people gathering to wave signs and pass around a mic. We’d caution solemnly against that.

Productive cooperation is in very short supply these days. While it shouldn’t fall to disparate groups of workers and private citizens to spell out the threat to lives and livelihoods that looms overhead due to the heedless drive for cost-saving and “efficiency,” it has. It is encouraging to see any shred of coherent coordination at the national, state and local level. The way things have been going, we’re likely to need more of it.