What the #Resistance Taught Me

Memories of the Women’s March leave me ambivalent. In some ways, it felt like it was done for show. “Ho, ho, hey, hey. We will not go away. Welcome to your first day,” the crowd chanted around me.

The sheer number of people was stirring in ways I hadn’t experienced before—not in spottily attended demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, or protests outside the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre’s press conference after the Sandy Hook mass shooting. This felt bigger, more global.

As alone as I often felt during the pandemic, I now recognize how that first injection of togetherness bolstered many women’s activism over the Trump years. For me, the march itself did less to prepare me for the years ahead than did the simple tasks of the day—grabbing people’s cellphone numbers, taking head counts to make sure we didn’t leave anyone at the rest stops, keeping everyone comfortable.

Without my very mundane role on the bus, where I was forced to ask people to pay attention to me and listen, I’m not sure I would have later run for local office twice and become a leader in my community. I hated standing up and asking for attention, but I got a thrill out of the small portion of care I could offer the people around me who were scared and hurting.

I imagine that one day my grandchildren might see photos of the march and ask about it. My own children, who’ve schlepped more door hangers and attended more city meetings than most adults do in a lifetime, will have vague memories of the years mom took an oath to uphold the Constitution and our small city’s charter.

We must not forget how much work it took to get to here, how many people went back home and spent these years pounding local sidewalks.

But I’m more likely to remember walking the center aisle of a bus, repeating myself, seat by seat, to make sure people could hear me ask if they were too warm, if they needed a bathroom break. I’ll remember the hellish pandemic summer when my own workdays were subsumed by calls and texts as my neighbors confronted the reality of systemic racial injustice in our country, as I tried to figure out the right way to support them, and sometimes failed mightily, but kept trying. I learned. I grew because of and for them. I had set out to march, mostly not knowing what else to do, worried over how policies I care about might be undone. I wanted to be one of many, and ended up being the one many came to for help.

There have been so many marches over these four years: women’s marches, climate marches, marches for Black Lives, and marches against gun violence. Trump’s January 6 rally on the National Mall was a sort of play on these protests, as through a mirror darkly, warping justice into violence, truth by lies.

We must not forget how much work it took to get to here, how many people went back home and spent these years pounding local sidewalks, serving their neighbors while the vacuum of leadership at the top was causing such harm. The dramatic Senate win in Georgia — on the shoulders of so many Black women organizers — demonstrated by how fine a sliver so much effort just secured victory.

Now, exhausted, we’re asked to braid together something resembling a united country. President Biden began his term with a series of executive orders, quickly undoing what he could of Trump’s polices. The concert and pomp echoed celebrations of more normal times. But unchecked, the pandemic is ravaging us. Trump’s leviathan still runs freely throughout our civil spaces. The ties that bind are perilously frayed.

Yes, the hats, the T-shirts, the hashtags, the signs and symbols of #resistance were sometimes performative. It could be annoying and minimizing to see people working so hard to signal they care about the right things. But all those signals sustained an American identity that maintained its independence from Trump’s politics of cruelty and harm.

My comfort as we enter this next stage in American history is a hope that memory of this time has been seared into enough of us. That civic participation, once a passive activity — an “I voted” sticker, a slogan, a hat — has been reshaped, forged into a solid, solemn duty to continue the work.

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