As I wrote this, I am returning by train and bus from New York City, where I and tens of thousands of others marched in the October 18 worldwide, anti-fascist No Kings Day protests. 

Fittingly, I had the day before attended a memorial service for my friend and world-renowned mathematician Peter Lax, who, as a teenager fled fascism in Hungary and played a key role in the Manhattan Project. Peter was Jewish, and his father, a prominent physician, was slow to recognize the dangers of the fascism growing in Hungary in the 1930s and early 1940s. But not Peter's mother. She saw the growing threat. She insisted the family flee to America, and they did so just in time.

Today we see a similar danger emerging here in America, as the Trump administration's authoritarianism grows by the day. Immigrants, antifascists, radicals, progressives and even liberals are fired, demonized, imprisoned and deported.

Here in Maine, what are Sen. Susan and Rep. Jared Golden doing about this growing threat to democracy? Nothing, that's what. They are sleeping as democracy is attacked daily. Sen. Collins voted out of committee President Trump's Big Billionaires' Bill, which punishes states that voted Democratic, and then played Maine voters for fools by casting a meaningless vote against the draconian bill on the Senate floor.

It's time to elect new leadership here in Maine. We need new leaders, young workers like Graham Platner, who won't fiddle and dawdle while Rome burns.

Lawrence Reichard lives in Belfast