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Participating in the 2017 Women's March was a very rewarding experience. Today, though, I'm asking: How much good did it do?
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Eight years ago tomorrow, my dad and I woke up well before dawn, hopped a Concord Coach to Boston, and met up with my Aunt Tracy to carpool to D.C. in her minivan for the Women’s March, scheduled for the day after the first inauguration of Donald Trump.
Originally, I didn’t want to go. The biggest difference between my personality and my dad’s is that he always loved traveling, and I’m less enthusiastically drawn toward it. It was Dad’s idea. But he couldn’t go by himself, because he was showing symptoms of what would turn out to be the cancer that killed him, and Mom had to stay home; my sister was in high school.
My brother was in the Navy, so I was deputized to go. I’m glad we did. It ended up being Dad’s last trip out of Maine. As we drove down, we ate sour deli pickles we picked up somewhere in New York and listened to Trump’s first inauguration on the radio. The speeches, like most speeches, were pretty boring. But I remember when Trump uttered the phrase “American carnage.” Dad and I and Aunt Tracy’s friend Barbara, who was also there, turned to each other and were like, “Did he really just say that? What is he talking about?”
I hope Trump doesn’t have psychic powers to predict the future (a terrifying thought) because we’ve certainly had some American carnage since then, haven’t we? Hundreds of thousands of Americans dead from a mismanaged COVID-19 pandemic. Women bleeding out from miscarriages that doctors are too afraid to treat for fear they’ll be prosecuted for performing an abortion. All the gun violence, but especially the murders motivated by racism and antisemitism.
And now he’s returning to office to make more terrible choices because eggs were expensive. They’re expensive now because 40 million laying hens have been culled due to bird flu that’s rapidly showing signs of hopping to humans. (I’m sure a Republican government will handle that just fine.)
It’s hard to see the success of the march now. Our country has entered an age where large protests in the streets don’t actually prompt our elected representatives to do anything. The futility of the Iraq War protests in 2003 should have been a herald to this.
The Women’s March in 2017 was, by many counts, the largest single-day protest in United States history, and what did it do? Trump and his Republicans got three Supreme Court justices in three years; Roe v. Wade was overturned in five. Our own allegedly pro-choice senator, Sen. Susan Collins, voted for two-thirds of them. My dad used to be so proud of her. Voted for her a couple times. In 2017, I naively thought she would stand up for what she said she believed in. I guess 24 is a little old to believe in career politicians, but I believed in Santa until I was 11.
On a personal level, I’m glad I went. The march in D.C. was the only time I’ve ever felt comfortable in such a large crowd. I don’t really like loud noises or lots of people or touching people, and the nation’s capital was literally a river of women that day. You were constantly pressing up against someone.
I had to hold the back of my dad’s jacket to keep us from being separated (he had a tendency to wander off). The vibes were just so sweet — like someone had zapped the all-girls high school I went to with a multiplier ray or something. It’s also probably the only time I’ve ever really felt like a part of history. Someday the Women’s March will be a page in my grandchildren’s history textbook and I’ll be able to point to it and tell them I was there, like my mom does with watching the moon landing live on television. Also, it’s the only time I’ve ever been in the same two-block radius as Scarlett Johansson.
I felt so hopeful on that day, even though it was right after Trump was sworn into office. Surely it had to mean something, that so many people from around the country came to Washington, D.C., to protest and march and let their voices be heard. Eight years on, staring down the gun of another Trump presidency and conservative federal trifecta, I feel much less hopeful.
Over the past eight years, the general public has stopped being shocked and appalled at Trump’s behavior. Nobody in his political party will stand up to him and now Democrats are talking about “working with him,” which will go about as well as working with a rabid dog.
Immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, are being thrown under the bus with nobody to stand up for them. The LGBTQ community is under attack in a way that we weren’t in 2017. I don’t know what the long-term effects of the Women’s March will be. In the short and medium term, I think the effects are smaller and more local. People began networking, women ran for offices in unprecedented numbers, from the local planning board (me!) all the way up to the presidency. (Let’s not talk about that one.)
Building a country, like building a house, starts from the bottom. Maybe some of the women who will help rebuild our country and lead it forward were in the crowd in D.C. on Jan. 21, 2017. We can only hope.
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