Why I Marched

The day after President Trump was inaugurated I marched in New York City with my youngest daughter and my only sister.

Over the next two days I read many of the comments posted on social media and articles written about the worldwide event. I was both saddened and surprised by the misunderstanding and anger towards people asserting their Constitutional right to protest peacefully.

I cannot speak for the estimated 3.6 to 4.6 million women, men and children who marched on January 21, but I can speak for myself, and some of my family and friends who marched.

We did vote.  I did more than vote: I donated money to an election campaign for the first time in my life; I also rang doorbells and made phone calls; and I spent 2 weeks in Florida volunteering to protect the vote.

We are not whiners, sore losers or cry babies.  I have voted in many presidential elections based on my own convictions, not party ideology or gender, and more often than not, my candidate lost.  I have never felt compelled to protest before.

We were not paid by George Soros or any organization.  We chose to march to participate in democracy.

Although organized as a woman’s march, I believe that the overarching theme of the march was not feminism.  I believe the march presented an opportunity to channel the concerns, anger, fear and mistrust created by candidate Trump and now President Trump, towards many groups and rights he has challenged, attacked and treated with disrespect. And so I marched.

I do understand that he is my President.  I am not attacking his legitimacy as our elected leader.  But I do question his continued need to revisit election results.  More troubling is his failure to demand that we immediately investigate the outrageous Russian interference with our democracy. Instead, he focused on the perceived personal slight created by the suggestion that the Russians helped elect him. The locus of his concerns is clear- him, not our country. And so I marched.

I have been urged to give him a chance.  It is hard for me to give a chance to someone who does not treat others with decency; who does not demonstrate an understanding of how our government works; who nominates billionaires who are unqualified to head the agencies they are tasked to lead; who nominates officials who do not support civil rights; who nominates people who do not even understand the scope of the agency they are to head; and who does not model ethical behavior for those he leads by totally separating himself from his businesses. It is hard for me to give him a chance when he believes he could serve as President and still run his business. I am forced to wonder, which one is the hobby?  And so I marched.

Tens of millions used their vote to endorse a man who defies social and political norms. They may say they do not agree with all he says or does, but their votes did not include room for a caveat.  Some Trump supporters, like Mike Huckabee, wish to attribute the views of the few marchers who spoke publically to all the marchers, and that is not reasonable. However,  if that sounds fair to you, I believe it is far more reasonable and logical to hold all those who voted for President Trump responsible for the well-founded fears and concerns he has created about the future, whether it is the loss of health care for millions of citizens; throwing senior citizens on fixed incomes off the stable, effective Medicare system into the abyss of the uncertain costs of the private health insurance market; trade wars with the resulting escalating cost of consumer goods; possible wars on the ground; the further diminishing of civil rights, especially voting rights; the vast waste of resources to build a border wall; and the soon to be irreversible effects of climate change.  And so I marched.

Congressman  John Lewis has quoted Martin Luther King Jr as saying, “nothing is more powerful than the rhythm of marching feet”.  That rhythm and the sight of an endless sea of people asserting their voices are what make America great.  And we will not now sit back and wait to see what comes.  We will be vigilant, vocal and we will vote.