Last year on January 21st, my partner and I were walking into the subway station to travel to the Women’s March in Toronto. I clutched a sign I’d painted, feeling a little nervous, not sure what to expect. Carrying a sign can feel vulnerable, like your thoughts are showing on the outside. But walking to the platform, there were women everywhere, with signs or pussy hats, talking excitedly. They were so bright, so bold, so . . . visible. Excitement overrode nervousness.
We walked down to the platform following a group of three or four adult women, and six or so kids. They smiles and enthusiasm, splashed with pink and carrying signs, and stopped to take a group photo on the platform. One of the little girls carried a hand-painted sign that said SCIENCE MATTERS. Reader, it flattened me. Tears poured down my face.
When the subway arrived, it was filled with buzzing protestors. One woman said she loved my sign and handed me an extra pussy hat—those vulnerable thoughts on posterboard had become a connection. I’m not really a sports fan, and I admit I can get annoyed when the subway is blue and white and rowdy on the night of a Leafs or a Jays game. But for the first time, I understood the excitement. I wasn’t just riding a wave, I was part of it.
When we got to Queen’s Park, it turned out we were 60,000 strong—about six times what the Facebook invite had been when I’d last checked. (And around the world, millions strong.) I gathered with friends and coworkers and my partner, with my pal S’s two-year-old, whose presence made my heart swell even more. Her mother had been nervous about bringing her, feared violence, but she was soon reassured and glad to be there. Her daughter won’t remember that day like those young girls on the platform will, but she’ll be able to tell her friends she was there. I hope she’ll brag about it.
The weather was unusually mild for January, as if the heat of all those bodies, that noise, that enthusiasm had forced a thaw. I walked the streets of my city, feeling a sort of omnidirectional love. It sounds extreme (and corny), I know, but it’s true. It’s what they want you to feel in Loving Kindness meditation. In a big city, we all walk around in tiny bubbles, avoiding eye contact on the subway, always gazing into the middle distance. But for a day, connection felt possible.
We live in a democracy, where every person, in theory, has a voice, but aside from modest voting line-ups, it always feels unreal to me: watching those numbers climb on election day coverage is kind of unfathomable. But the day of that march, these numbers felt fathomable in its most old-fashioned sense: it felt like we were measuring the depth of the sea.
Leading up to the march I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, which I now consider one of a handful of books that caught me in its current, that carried me onto a slightly different course. Some of its key principles are that hope is vital and also active—not a lottery ticket, but “an ax you break down doors with in an emergency”—and that small changes can have profound effects, though we may never know what they are—as the Zapatista uprising was “a flower whose weightless seeds were taken up by the wind.” I could spend a whole post quoting this book, but I hope that you’ll read it, find your own passages that light up like fireflies.
This year, the organizers are putting on another march, and I can’t go, which pains me. Longstanding plans out of town with friends flying in can’t be cancelled or moved. But there will be other marches, for other worthy causes, and I walked in some of them last year. In any case, there are still ways to help: I’ve given money to help offset organizational costs of this march, and tomorrow night I’ll show up to make signs and assist in any way I can. This makes me nervous, as any social situation where I might not know someone does, but I have to remember how I felt that day, that sense of kinship and solidarity, that shared purpose. These are not quite strangers.
The Cheeto presidency no longer seems like a fresh crisis, it’s true, and that will likely mean there aren’t millions in the streets around the world this weekend. But the man cooks up hot & fresh crises on the regular, whether it’s attempts to roll back DACA, ban travel from select Muslim countries, strip the vulnerable of health care, undermine climate change prevention, or slide fetal personhood into a tax bill. And Ivanka’s dad aside, women, racialized, LGBTQ+, and Indigenous people, migrants and the disabled all over the world must deal more often with violence, lower pay, restricted access to healthcare, education, and reproductive rights, and more. In a year of #MeToo and #TimesUp, we’ve seen there’s so much that we can do, and also so much more to do. And that prospect can seem exhausting, but let me reassure you that last year’s march was anything but.
“I can barely remember what seemed so pressing when I didn’t participate in great historical moments,” writes Solnit, “but I know that the same kind of things seem pressing now, and that I have to push some of them aside.” So if you can attend a local march this year, I hope you will. Coming together again is an opportunity to hear the power of our voices united, to recommit together to tackling oppression at home and abroad. To remember when we made history in 2017, and to remember that we are still making it, with what we do and don’t do. What kind of story it will be is up to us.
Echolocation 