The Women's March in DC Was Huge!!

UPDATED BELOW (1/25)
In keeping with my theme this year, yesterday I and about 500,000 other people chose to participate in the Women's March in Washington, D.C. and it was awesome!!  My sister Diane traveled from New Jersey so we could go together along with her sister-in-law and some close friends.  We were a group of seven traveling to DC via car and metro.  Another good friend offered parking at her house near the Takoma Metro station where we hopped on the Red line to Union Station and were part of something HUGE!!

Our Group of Marchers

Our new President likes to say many things are going to be, or will be HUGE, but this truly was.  Far exceeding organizers expectations, women traveled from all over the country to be in DC yesterday and those who couldn't make it here, marched in their local cities and suburbs in HUGE numbers as well.  On the way down from New Jersey my sister called near the Delaware Memorial Bridge to tell me she was in a "Women's March Traffic Jam"!  Everywhere she looked were cars of women, by themselves, in pairs and in groups heading to DC.

I've heard reports that at least 1200 buses applied for parking permits and I saw many pictures of planes filled with women flying to DC.  Some of my friends turned their homes in to Airbnb for the weekend to give many people a place to stay when local hotel prices were out of reach.

Why did I, and all these women decide to go to this march?  Is it the birth of a new women's movement or something even bigger?  I don't know.  I hope the momentum from yesterday turns in to something spectacular.  Before I go further describing the march experience though, I will tell you why I marched.

I marched for a lot of the same reasons that I consider myself a liberal and a progressive.  I want women to have complete and total control of their own bodies.  I want full reproductive freedom whether its access to birth control or safe abortion or my doctor telling me the truth about my medical decisions.  I want us to protect the environment.  I want us to invest in renewable energy and I want us to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.  I want to keep the clean air and clean water act.  I want to protect Social Security and Medicare and I don't want the Affordable Care Act  to be repealed.  I want us to ensure public education is available to everyone.  I believe in raising the minimum wage and making college affordable.  I want women to earn equal pay for equal work.  I marched for Women of Color because I believe Black Lives Matter.  Finally, I believe that a lot of the progress we've made during my lifetime is now under threat with the new Administration unlike anything we've seen before and I want my voice to be heard.  I want to join with others who have similar inclinations and work towards changing not only our representatives at the national level, but at the local level as well.

Our group departed my house at 7am to drive to Takoma and catch the Metro.  When we got to Union Station around 9 a.m. it was already packed.  The line to Dunkin' Donuts as soon as you come off the Metro was long and we headed up the next elevator to grab a quick bite at Au Bon Pain.  We walked out towards the Capital where free signs were available and of course the non-official merchandise that is found at every single event ever.

My friend Tracey and I with our signs

Of course as we made our way towards the Capital we stopped for pictures and to buy a tshirt or two.  We even managed to run into a friend from school before we headed towards the larger crowds. Their were rows upon rows of port-a-potties up to and around the Capital building and the bunting and chairs were still out from the inauguration the day before.  As we approached the main area, which we still couldn't see, the crowds were getting thicker and thicker.  We saw a lifesize Hilary marching with a pussy hat on.  There were a lot of homemade signs too.  One said "Super Callous Fragile Ego Trump You Are Atrocious" (hopefully I remembered that right).  We managed to get ourselves in with a large group of people making their way up and around the National Museum of the American Indian.  A woman near me said she thought if we went that direction we could go up a block or two and see and hear the folks speaking on the podium.  Native Americans at the museum were engaged in a small gathering focused on stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline.  Everywhere we looked were women in pink pussy hats and the crowd was friendly and extremely happy.

Now, I didn't do all my homework about the march.  I had it in my head that the march started at 10 am, but apparently the speaking was starting earlier and the march itself wasn't starting until 1:15pm.  Okay, that's fine.  Of course, as we worked our way around the patios and steps of the museum, we were in a giant crush of people.  When I say crush, I mean that each person occupied a space as big as their person and not much more.  People pressed in on each other from all sides.  We were intimately close with one another.  You really couldn't inch any farther forward and going backwards was a bigger challenge than what a Salmon faces swimming upstream to spawn.

My sister and I attended Oakland Mills High School ('86 and '83 respectively) and the halls were packed with students and moving fast in between classes.  We know how to move through a crowd.  Not on this day.  There was no where to go, and some people were getting very antsy.  At about 10 am we were standing on the patio around the museum, off to our left we could glimpse the jumbotron, but we couldn't see it clearly and we couldn't hear anything the speakers were saying.  The crush of people was only getting greater.  No one had any phone service to speak of.  Diane and her sister in law were probably 15 ft away from me, but at least 30 people stood in between us.   Looking at my watch I was thinking I can't see the speakers, I can't hear the speakers and I'm feeling mashed and so I thought we should get out of the crush.  I tried to signal Diane but at times the crowd was loud and it was hard to get through.  I couldn't text or call because I didn't have phone service.

Looking across the sea of people towards
the Air and Space Museum

I looked across the street towards the Air and Space museum and I could tell that people next to the building had freedom of movement, but not a lot.  I also didn't think we could make it there when I looked at the sea of people.  I turned around and could see the National Gallery of Art and thought we might have a chance if we went in that direction.  I didn't see any way we could go back the way we had come.  I finally got Diane's attention and we turned our group around and made our slow way out of the crowd.

I said earlier that the crowd was friendly and polite, and that's mostly true, but put even the most polite people together in a crush and nerves are sure to be on edge.  Groups attempting to escape the crowd had linked arms and would push through a crack in the people and you'd be trapped, unable to move while they forced their way out.  Or you'd be faced with people who surprisingly were attempting to move deeper in to the crowd.  Folks next to me at the National Museum of the American Indian said Jamie Raskin was their representative and they were supposed to be meeting up near the podium.  I learned last night they had stopped people from coming into the area close to the podium because there were already too many people at that point.

Scary moments are when you feel a force pushing at your back and know that you are powerless to stop it.  Calls to cease pushing could be heard.  An ambulance appeared seemingly out of nowhere on Jefferson Drive and 4th Street.  The crowd could not part to let the ambulance get through.  As we weaved our way slowly through the crowds I could hear people calling to let the ambulance through and knew we could make it across Jefferson Drive and the ambulance wouldn't have made it to where we were the crowds were that thick.  In desperation to get through the crowd people started claiming, truthfully or not that they had a great need to move ahead of others.  A woman near me said that people she was with were having anxiety attacks.  I was concerned and asked where they were.  "Well, they're ahead of us now, I can't see them."  Another woman was softly calling "Lilly!" and peering behind me.  I asked if she needed help locating someone and my efforts garnered me a dirty look.  I'm not innocent of the snark.  At one point four tall men pushed their way in front of my friends and I, and I felt that I had been shoved aside.  I said "Don't worry, women are used to being pushed aside to let men through, don't worry about us."  The young man turned to me and said "We're marching with our Mom and trying to keep up with her."  Well, okay, good for you, but you still didn't need to push me aside.

A woman on a scooter yelled out "Scooter!! Coming through!!" and literally ran over the feet of a man near me.  He said "You're running over my feet!!"  The woman on the scooter didn't seem to care.  I heard that an elderly, sick woman needed to get through, that a child in a wheel chair needed to get through, that a woman in a wheel chair needed to get through, and when I or someone else in the crowd would ask where they were, they were not near enough to be seen.  I also saw people smile and help people catch up with their groups.  At one point my sister and I were separated and the crowd chanted my name as they parted enough to let me slide through and catch up with her.  That was the majority of the time.

I think it took us a good hour to move through all those people as we worked our way up 4th street to the National Gallery of Art where we finally had room to move about.  We also managed to run in to another friend who had grown up across the street from us.  We took advantage of the time to head in to the museum, use the bathroom, look at some art and regroup.  We decided to grab lunch a few blocks from the march and then join the march in progress afterwards.  When we made our way back to the march though, everyone was pooped out.  At least one in our party just wasn't feeling right and we decided to call it a day.  We hopped on the red line at Metro Center and headed out.

We listened to the coverage on the way home and got to my house and kicked back to take in all the televised coverage.  It was amazing watching all the people who had gone to the marches around the country and seeing how many people had shown up in DC.  I'm so glad that we went even if we didn't actually join in a moving march.  I felt and still do feel energized like something great is about to happen and this is just the beginning.  I hope the momentum sticks with us and that people get involved at all levels of government.  Think about all the people who have a say over your life that you vote for.  From the group of people deciding about reserved parking and what color I can paint my door in my townhouse community, to the Board of Education, the County Council, the State Legislature and all the way up to the President of the United States.  It's a lot of folks who are making decisions that impact the way we live, whether or not we thrive, and determining how much freedom we get to lead our lives in the way we see fit.

The importance of the march yesterday to me at least is, as I said earlier, I want my voice to be heard.  I want to be taken in to account when decisions are made.  I'm going to be writing and calling and attending meetings and if there's another march, I'm going to be there.  Today the women's march sent out a plan for 10 actions in 100 days.  The first one is a postcard that goes to your elected representatives.  They said have a party and fill yours out and mail them off.  Well, okay, I will do that.  I commit to do the ten things they're going to ask.  It's a choice I'm making that I'm involved and I'm committed because this is important.  We're deciding what we want our world to look like and I'm not sitting on the sidelines for that.

UPDATE 1/25 - When I originally published this on Sunday, crowd estimates were at around 500,000.  I'm now hearing that more than 1,000,000 people were at the march in DC.