On inauguration day—rainy and dank and “full of
mourning,” as one friend wrote on a Facebook post—we gathered in my friend
Christine’s kitchen in Hastings-on-Hudson and made signs, first trolling the Internet
for catchy slogans. Christine, who had already knitted several pink pussy hats,
liked “Keep Your Tiny Hands Off My Rights,” while I was partial to “If You’re
Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention,” though I worried it could be too much
work to block and color all those letters. We settled on WOMEN’S RIGHTS: NOW
AND FOREVER and LOVE TRUMPS HATE, though Pat, a college English teacher, pointed
out that grammar was key for this slogan because if you used the possessive
LOVE TRUMP’S HATE, you could be mistaken for a supporter of the new president.
But with
our pink pussy hats, pink scarves, and pink backpacks filled with clementines
and hard-boiled eggs, we were instantly identified as women’s marchers. Riding
the train into Grand Central the next morning, gathering on 42nd
street to walk up Fifth Avenue to Trump Tower, with thousands of other
grandmothers, mothers, and daughters memed out in pink, we didn’t spot one
he-who-must-not-be-named supporter. (The only figure remotely threatening was a
hulking guy in an oversized black jacket with letters on his back screaming
JESUS SAVES FROM THE WRATH OF GOD, the last four words going up in flames.) Having
read about outbreaks of violence in D.C. on inauguration day—a limo set on
fire, a Starbuck’s window smashed—we had worried that we could be beaten up,
pepper sprayed, or even arrested.
But the
mood was benign, almost festive. About an hour before our group, which included
Christine’s daughter, son-in-law, and three children, was scheduled to march, I
had hurried across 42nd street to use a café bathroom (the lines for
the Ladies in Grand Central were epic). Returning, I spotted a platoon of some
fifty New York City police decked out in biking gear, mounted on ten speeds and
pedaling East. Along the crowded sidewalks, protesters and passersby stopped to
watch, cheer, and clap. Wow! This was light years away from the sixties where
the cops were pigs. It was as if all of New York were turning out to
say no to this native New Yorker who threatened to take away everything—from
the Affordable Care Act to Planned Parenthood to the fine points of the First
Amendment—that New Yorkers held dear.
I took
173 photos that day, asking my friends to hold our signs so that I could record
everything: the faces, the outfits, the signs, which outdid one another in manic
creativity: CUT YOUR HAIR NOT OBAMACARE read one held by Christine’s
ten-year-old granddaughter. A slight, sixtyish balding man standing alone in
the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Hall held up a sign that he’d obviously spent
some time creating: REPEAL AND REPLACE TRUMP: PROFESSIONALLY UNPREPARED,
INTELLECTUALLY ILL-INFORMED, MORALLY COMPROMISED, and TEMPERMENTALLY UNFIT. He
beamed when I asked to take his picture. Another guy brandished a MAKE AMERICA
THINK AGAIN sign. But my favorite was the one crayoned in childish red scrawl
on a raggedy piece of cardboard and held up by a girl in pig tails clinging to her
pink-scarfed mother two blocks from Trump Tower: MY DOG WOULD BE A BETTER
PRESIDENT.
The plan
had been to walk to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and then north up Second Avenue
before turning west toward Fifth Avenue. But the crowds were so thick that we
only got as far as Lexington before heading uptown. At times, there was human
gridlock. We came to a standstill. If
you suffered from claustrophobia, being in such close quarters with others
could be scary. But the faces—black, brown, white, young, old, male, female—of
the marchers reassured you, and, as you got closer to Trump Tower, there were volunteers
in orange vests on the sidewalks, some holding loudspeakers. On Fifth Avenue,
you could hear bells from St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church playing “This Land is
Your Land,” and somehow you knew that everything was going to be okay, that the
spirit of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and Ghandi were with you.
Later
that afternoon, gathering for a glass of wine in the kitchen in Hastings-on-Hudson,
we watched MSNBC, which had been covering the march in D.C. all day, the sister
marches in Boston and San Francisco and Seattle, in London and Paris and Antarctica,
we felt what I can only describe as a kind of elation. We had lived to tell our
tale; we were part of something magical, something larger and bigger than anything
we had ever witnessed in our lifetimes, and even though it was disturbing to
watch Sean Spicer shouting at reporters in the White House press room that the
media had falsified the numbers at the inauguration, that there were more
people at Trump’s inauguration than at Obama’s two previous inaugurations, more
people, in fact, than at any inauguration in history, assertions that would
later be proven false, what Kellyanne Conway would call “Alternative Facts,”
even though all this was crazy-making and even more crazy-making the evil
executive orders President Trump would sign that very first week—cutting funds
for abortion at home and abroad, building a wall against Mexico, limiting
immigration to the U.S. from Muslim countries—still, what could not be taken away,
not by Sean Spicer, not by Kellyanne Conway, not by Steve Bannon, was that we
had shown up and resisted and permitted ourselves to be counted--all over the city,
all over the country, all over world, and that we would not shut up until this
mad dog of an illegitimate president was reined in by Congress or the courts.
Yes, he was the leader of the free world, but he was accountable to us, the
people, and we would not let him forget it.
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