There’s absolutely no way I’ll be able to describe the Chicago Women’s March today in any authoritative fashion. The closest I could get to the stage was still a quarter of a mile away, so I didn’t see or hear any of the speeches or speak to the organizers. I couldn’t get Internet access on my phone, so I didn’t learn the march part had been canceled until I’d marched with the crowd for several blocks up the middle of Michigan Avenue and a stranger with better service told me. Her husband was watching the news at home and said that 250,000 people had come out and that it was the largest march in the country outside of D.C. It was bigger than the speakers, bigger than the organizers, bigger even than the Chicago Police Department who originally said the crowd was too large to march from Grant Park to Federal Plaza safely and then let us march anyway.
I don’t think he had a worldwide series of demonstrations against himself in mind. But then again, you could look at the marches today as demonstrations of the things people are for: peace, justice, equal rights, women’s sovereignty over their own bodies, freedom of speech, belief in science, the notion that everyone matters. This is the children’s book version of America—or rather the version of America I was taught to believe in when I was really little, and then was dismantled bit by bit as I learned about all the injustices in the world. But today it was real.
