I marched! It was wonderful! There’s plenty of good analysis going around about the successes and failures of this march; I don’t have a ton to add to that because I honestly had pretty limited awareness of what was going on at the national and international level. I had no idea quite how enormous this had become until I saw the news later, although I started to get an inkling when I went to catch the light rail and saw the crowd of people just waiting to get onto the platform to buy a ticket, and the trains going by without letting anybody else on because they were jam-packed already. I waited for a bus for a little while, thinking that might be better, but the bus didn’t even stop. I ended up walking there, about three miles. Just as I was starting out I ran into someone I know from choir, and I walked with her and her family and friends. (Weird moment: I was starting to say, “I went to a women’s college out east,” and one of the friends said “Let me guess, not Smith–Mount Holyoke, right?” and I was struck speechless. Apparently he and his wife used to live in western Mass, but even so! I hadn’t even named a state! I seem to have Mount Holyoke written all over my face.)
I started to feel like that was the march, all of us trying to get to the march, a crowd liberally spotted with pink hats–I wish I had thought to make a hat! I didn’t even find out about the hats until like the day before the protest–trooping down University Avenue, following some strangers down a shortcut because they seemed to know where they were going, and we were cutting through a park when someone said “I can hear the crowd!” I said “I think that’s just 94.” But within moments the sound resolved into voices, unmistakably, including someone on a megaphone, and when we got closer to the bridge over the interstate I could see the place where the march was supposed to start, and it was just. Swarmed with people. Everywhere. We ended up being at the march starting point for at least an hour, because there was nowhere to march, because the entire area from us to the Capitol was already filled with bodies, a half mile of human bodies and way, way more of us behind them waiting our turn.
The wait meant I had a good chance to look around at the signs and everybody had time to chant things. “Say it loud and say it clear/refugees are welcome here” and a few rounds of “we are family” and “we don’t want your tiny hands/anywhere near our underpants.” We finally made it up, bit by little bit, until we actualfax marched up to the Capitol and the rally that had been going on for hours by that point. I stayed for speeches by the president of Planned Parenthood MN, and my state senator (a pleasant surprise, as I’d lately been somewhat fruitlessly trying to learn anything about her), and Nekima Levy-Pounds, a civil rights lawyer and leader in the local NAACP. I’m glad she was there–she’s a dynamite speaker and to have her deliberately name and praise Black Lives Matter, and be met with such thunderous cheers and applause, felt like an important moment not just for the march but for the city.
Eventually my feet got cold, and my cell phone grabbed a moment of signal off the overloaded network and I got a message from my mom, who had gotten to the capitol hours before me and then got cold and went for lunch, so I walked another mile or so to where she and my dad and aunt were because it didn’t even occur to me to try to get around another way at that point. There were still tons of people in Lowertown, well away from the rally, when I got there. The restaurants had clearly had no idea what was coming.
I took some pictures, or tried; but not only did I not have a good vantage point all day, I accidentally had my phone camera set to “Live,” where it takes a couple seconds of video instead of a still picture. So that’s weird, but honestly I like my tiny noisy movies better than I would like them as unfocused photos.
What does this march mean, I don’t know, but it was the first time since November that I’ve felt any hope in the power of people turning out, showing up, making the trek, the first time since November 8 that I was able to sing or even think about “Sister Suffragette,” as we did on the long initial walk, without *only* feeling betrayed and sad. I had much more small-scale work and conversations on the slate for the next morning, and I went into them feeling bolstered and back-stiffened, and that is what I needed.
