Member-only story
Why We Marched In 2017
And why we keep marching
“We must accept finite disappointment but never loose infinite hope.”— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The bus ride is a time machine, buzzing with a sort of vengeful joy and purposefulness. Gray-haired women in political slogan t-shirts and pink pussy hats. A handful of couples. All of us in sensible shoes or hiking boots, and if someone started singing “We Shall Overcome,” or “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” we might rocket back to the 60s or 70s to encounter our younger selves filled with hope and promise. When time brought us forward again to this specially chartered Women’s March Rally Bus, we’d find that today’s hopes are materializing into something bigger than we had imagined. The Baltimore Washington Parkway is a lumbering herd of buses, creeping through the dawn.
When I first look into the windows of the bus next to me and see the woman in the pink knitted hat and glasses, I think it’s my own reflection, but it’s not. I can look through that bus into yet another bus and see more women in pussy hats. No matter how alone each of us might have felt during the losses we’ve suffered by this time in our lives, we are not alone now. We are not alone in our revulsion over misogyny. We are not alone in our passion for equal pay and equal power. We are not alone in the aftermath of rape and sexual assault, or in the…
