On the Ground at the 2020 DC Women’s March

Yesterday I got my cold and sore self on the metro and made my way into DC for the 4th annual Women’s March. My now-husband and I were at the first march in 2017. I had a baby in June of 2018, so we were not able to attend the previous two years.

I went to the march with a girlfriend of mine who also has a young child. We both went to the 2017 march but did not go to the 2018 or 2019 marches. We kept comparing those two marches to each other. The biggest difference that we could find was that we did not feel claustrophobic. The 2017 march felt so cramped and squeezed together that my husband and I felt unsafe. According to some estimates, there were half a million people at the 2017 march. At the time of writing, I hadn’t found any estimates of how many were at this year’s march yesterday. But it was nowhere near half a million people.

The events of the march followed this order. After waiting around for an hour in the cold listening to pro-female music, the speakers began. We heard from Native American women. Andrea Waters King spoke next. Martin Luther King III, her spouse, introduced her. The largest part of this pre-march time was learning the song and dance for Un Violador en Tu Camino (A rapist in your path). Women all over the world marched while singing this song at different marches. The marchers here were going to march around the White House and sing and dance around it (even though Trump was in Mar-A-Lago).

The marching itself was a feeling of support and community that one doesn’t normally feel via a computer screen. Knowing that there are millions of people who feel the same way that I do about the state of this world and administration gives me hope in 2020. The Senate gives me no hope.

What this march has done is to add energy to my conviction. 2020 is going to be a tipping point in politics. More women winning their primaries, more diverse voices being heard, and hopefully a new president being inaugurated in January of 2021.