The feeling of communing at the march also supercharged what came to be known as the resistance, sending millions of people back home fortified for the essential slog of activism - the calls, the letters, the grassroots organizing. A Seattle teenager, who participated in a Black Lives Matters protest before her local women’s march, and is biracial, put it this way, “I hope people take this time to realize that if you aren’t here for all ethnicities and all marginalized groups, then we aren’t going to see change.” But from what I saw, people leaned into those uncomfortable feelings, questioning whether they were doing enough to support everyone’s rights, not just their own. Which isn’t to say the protest didn’t also highlight divisions that were painful, like the signs pointing out that the majority of white women voted for Trump. Paul to the Capitol, and it was amazing to see all these people coming together in solidarity.” Julie Whitehorn, a writer and community organizer in Seattle, said one of the things she loved the most was, “You had men advocating for women, whites for people of color, cis for trans.” In a way, the march was like a reverse engineering of Trump’s us versus them rhetoric. Paul, Minnesota, put it this way, “I looked down at the size of the crowd, from the Cathedral of St. Ana Pottratz Acosta, an immigration lawyer and law professor at Mitchell Hamline in St. When I started interviewing women the week after the march, I heard this again and again. And here’s the thing: Standing alongside so many different causes actually amplified people’s determination it didn’t water it down. It was a communing, united around the idea of dignity and equality for all. Well, absolutely the march was about a feeling - the feeling of solidarity. The first was that it was more about a feeling, a primal scream, than a coherent policy objective. It was also, almost certainly, the largest protest in US history. So it was strange when two lines of thought emerged, almost immediately, to dismiss it. Standing amid the joyous hodgepodge of causes - civil rights, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, freedom of religion, immigration, the environment, and on and on - it was a reminder of what it felt to stand for something, instead of just against something. The march slipped from view.īut for those of us who marched, it didn’t fade away. Michael Flynn resigned and the Russia scandal roared into life. Steve Bannon put himself on the National Security Council. There was the travel ban and the protests at the airports. Exuberance.Īnd then, we all flew home and well - things just got crazy. Arms linked with my aunts and cousins, I felt something I hadn’t felt since election day. A group of women, all north of 70, sang We Shall Overcome next to us - “Final verse, we shall live in peace!” the leader cried out, and the crowd joined in. Strangers greeted each other with hoots of excitement marchers with ukuleles sang This Land is Your Land “Tiny hands can’t crush democracy,” proclaimed one sign, while “Keep your tiny hands of my reproductive rights, gropenfuhrer,” blasted another. The vibe was gentle, kind, ecstatic, electrifying. Women, men, babies, and kids of all ages choked the streets, as hundreds of thousands of protesters made their way to the Women’s March. The next morning I found myself, along with three generations of my mother’s family, swept along in the massive pink tide streaming toward the gates of the Capitol. Quote after quote blazed from the walls: We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs ‘down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. A woman stood next to me, and it was clear we had both been crying. memorial, where a 30-foot statue of King looked out over the Potomac. When it was over, I walked down Independence Avenue to the Martin Luther King Jr. I sat out Trump’s inauguration in the restaurant of the Watergate Hotel, reading Middlemarch.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |