The Magic of Pussy Hats

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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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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