A threshold moment, a change just large enough that everything after is seen in a different light than everything before, can seem almost ordinary at the time. Often these turning points aren’t recognized and identified until the end of the year when people looking back can pick out the moment where everything changed. Sometimes, though, the moment is so dramatic that you recognize right there that something big has happened. The Women’s March yesterday was such an occasion. I was not free to follow the events as they occurred, preoccupied as I was with friends’ problems with computers, cars, and clutter along with my own concerns, so the events of the day struck me almost all at once in the middle of the evening. I have little sense of the order in which they occurred but I don’t believe I will forget the order in which they came to me in the form of secondhand stories and headlines. Even if I had not known the substance of the event, I could not avoid being blown away by the scale. Thousands of people I have met personally were there. There were too many news stories to count — I must have seen hundreds of headlines without going to look for them.
I saw the aerial photos. So many people showed up in Washington that a physical march was impossible. The crowd completely filled the intended marching route and an alternate route and spilled out onto the side streets. I could not help but compare these photos to those of the event of the day before. On Friday for the Trump inaugural address, photos showed more bare carpet than people in attendance. The audience Friday was so sparse that it could not possibly have included all of the members of Congress who had promised to be there. Surely they or their staffers were watching the events on television in their offices but the importance of the event did not justify the risk and inconvenience of stepping outside. The threats contained and implied in Trump’s speech did not deter the Women’s March, however, and if the Trump event was ten times smaller than a major free concert on the Mall, the Women’s March was ten times larger. And that was just in Washington. Friends on Twitter offered similar photos from St. Louis, Chicago, Seattle. The event extended to Mexico City, Berlin, Sydney, Cape Town, Antarctica. This one event was surely bigger than everything the Trump White House will do spanning his time in office.
But it was not the number of people that made the Women’s March a threshold moment. No matter how many people you can draw together, if the messages and sentiments are conflicting and impractical, it is all for nothing. I saw and heard a few minutes of the event. There were speeches by Gloria Steinem, Alicia Keys, Scarlett Johansson, and many more who I did not happen to see. The message more than held together, it galvanized. Everything they said was following in the tradition of Martin Luther King and his timeless call for human dignity. The signs people were carrying echoed the same sentiments. It was a bold stand to take less than a week after officials of the incoming administration made it clear that calls for human dignity and decency will be met with contempt and retaliation.
Madonna seemed to get the most headlines for the profanity in her address, but perhaps the attention was fitting, since she may have summed up the feeling of the day as well as anyone. Elizabeth Warren, though politically correct as always, was clearly pissed off at the Washington and Wall Street insiders who pushed her to the sidelines in 2016. And why wouldn’t she be? If the corrupt Democratic Party establishment had allowed Warren to run, she would be president today. We would be talking about steps to solve the country’s problems, not how to best survive the kind of aggressive dismantling that, historically, great countries rarely recover from. This was not the attack-dog Warren we endured in 2016, but the old Warren we remember from 2015 and before, practical and principled. The Women’s March was the day we learned that Warren is free to speak again.
For me, the moment I knew things had changed was when Michael Moore ripped up the “Trump Takes Power” newspaper headline. Moore’s message was simple and direct, that the majority of Americans working together could minimize and shorten the damage and violence of the Trump era. It was not such a profound message but it was enough to reframe the situation. Yes, there are reasons to fear the injury, death, and economic loss that will result from the policies Trump has already announced, not to mention other policies to follow, and the situation is all the more troubling for women who have been targets of Republican repression for a lifetime. But we are not here merely to survive one of the most brutal periods in the history of our country. There is a lot we can do despite, or perhaps even because of, the active animosity of our government toward us. In the end, no matter what anyone does, the corporate system and big-money politics will collapse of their own weight, but there is reason to hope that we can make that upcoming transition go more smoothly and happen sooner. In the end, there is nothing Trump and his cronies can do to save the system he represents. That would be the case even if they were competent leaders. Knowing that they are a pack of liars, hypocrites, and buffoons, and recognizing that Trump himself is a feeble old man who does little more than watch television all day, perhaps “Trump Takes Power” really is a headline to laugh at.
This view changes the situation from one of hoping to survive an unfair challenge to the prospect of overcoming the challenge and being part of the triumph to follow. The expectation of just surviving is a low-energy state and it was easy to see the lethargy affecting the country on Friday, a very dark day not just in terms of the weather. This morning I see people with more energy, thinking of things to do and going and doing them. Perhaps only 25 million people were directly involved in the Women’s March yesterday, but the changes it represents will by now have reached twice as many. These numbers and this clarity of purpose are not a bad place to start from when a country urgently needs a change.
