Our Resistance
We marched. We chanted. We sang. We lifted each other’s spirits which had been wavering between despair and disbelief since our world went haywire on November 8.
For the first time since the election, I felt hopeful. Here were kindred strangers: women and men, grandmothers and toddlers, black and white and brown, Muslims and Jews and Christians and atheists, all putting our bodies where our beliefs were.
We walked past the iconic lions of the Art Institute, streaming peacefully onto the same boulevards where nearly fifty years earlier men and women had taken to the streets during the tumultuous Democratic Convention. This time, it was not the nations’ unjust war that hung in the balance, but the fate of women’s rights and those who stand to lose the most from the election of our narcissist in chief. The poor. Blacks and Latinos. Those who risk losing health insurance after having gained it for the first time in their lives. Our Muslim sisters and brothers. Immigrants who fear deportation. The Dreamers, sons and daughters of immigrants brought here by their parents without documentation. In one collective voice, we were saying, ‘We will have each other’s backs.”
Amazingly, there no reports of violence among the 250,000 marchers who filled the streets around Grant Park and spilled into the Loop, a number ten times the original number forecast. Our march in Chicago was just one of 600 such protests worldwide- from Antarctica to Atlanta.
We rallied in place, taking turns to lead chants when our own voices grew too hoarse. My friend Barbara and I took turns wearing her mauve pussy hat which she had knit. Like thousands of others, we couldn’t get anywhere near the stage to hear speeches by the cast of Hamilton and other celebrities. But it didn’t matter. We were the movement, teachers and doctors and students and office workers, mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and friends who held each other up, our eyes gazing up to a January blue sky-feeling blessed. We took pictures of our homemade signs which made us laugh “I can’t believe I’m still fighting for this shit,” was the message of one older woman. I gave a thumbs up to what looked to be a Russian-looking babushka in pink whose homemade sign read simply, ‘Nyet, Trump.” Perhaps the most poignant sign was not made with poster board and markers. It was, quite simply, a single clothes hanger lifted in the air by a young woman.