My weather app says it's snowing but it's not snowing

Weird, because when I click on the radar, a blue blob hovers over my house. 

Outside my house, in reality, still, no snow. Someone's fallen down on the job. The weather person, the radar man, the sky. Five years ago I joined a crowd of 500,000 people in the DC streets, so many of us you couldn’t see where we began or ended, the group I was with holding hands so we wouldn’t lose ourselves. I have never been a part of something so massive, for one brief moment 

the bodies around me lifting my feet off the ground, the swell of voices, my heart. I thought something transformative had happened, but when it was over, we unclasped hands and went our separate ways. Driving home we ate at a quiet hotel restaurant, our pink knitted hats tucked away in our small suitcases and the world kept turning, snowing 

when the weather app said it was snowing, or not, and no apologies either way. Who is in charge of this place? Not me that's for sure, but once I was a person who packed a knitted hat, took to the road. Look. In the time it took me to write these random thoughts, snow has started to fall. Outside 

the world, finally, rightly, catching up with the radar. 

Why I March (part two)

A high school student asked me at the rally. She was doing a class project, an interview. Why are you here?

She asked my husband first, and he held up his hand and said, Wait. I need to think about it.

He was with me this time around. Actually, he was the reason I was there, at the march. All morning I kept changing my mind. It was cold outside. It had started to sleet. Soon, it would turn into a blizzard, the weather channel kept saying. Maybe the March would be cancelled. I mean, who would drive downtown on potentially treacherous roads to wave a sign in the freezing rain?

Come on, my husband said. I'll drive you. 

I didn't wear my pink hat this time. I didn't even make a sign. I didn't know what I would put on a sign. Honestly, my head was sort of muddled up about why I march.

Two years ago, my first march, it was crystal clear. I was shocked by the election outcome, outraged at the treatment of women by the new president, disgusted and appalled by his views on anyone who isn't white, his bullying of people with disabilities and veterans and refugees. That day I stood with over 500,000 other people, who seemed equally outraged. I didn't know until the drive home that there had been marches in cities all over the country, all over the world, with millions of people sharing the same shock, horror, rage, and disgust.

Today, I have all of those same feelings of course (except shock). Plus, a whole new slew of things to be horrified by and enraged and disgusted over, too many things to fit on a sign.

Something you may not know about marches is how Not-Angry they are. It's just a group of people standing in the rain. A cross section of humans. Take away the signs, and we are any crowd gathered in a park. People in wheelchairs. People pushing strollers or carrying their toddlers on their shoulders. People walking dogs. Women and men. Black people and white people. Christians and Jews and Muslims.

The signs and chants are angry, clever, funny. We listen to speeches. Mull around with each other. Walk together.

After the first march I came home fired up. I joined political organizations and went to meetings and called my congressman and my senator so many times the people answering the phones knew my name. I gathered signatures on petitions and wrote letters to the editor and canvassed neighborhoods to remind people to vote.

I know on a logical level that this is what democracy looks like,

that change takes time, that organizations aren't perfect, that the people who run them are flawed, that every election will not go my way, that even so, it is worth it to stand up, to be a body in the crowd.

Standing outside in the cold, in the rain, I remember.

Why are you here?

I stand with women, my husband answered. My wife. My daughter. I stand with everyone here.

And you, she said, holding her phone out to me?

Something of a Radical

Last week someone called me a radical.

Okay, it was my husband, and I think he meant it in a nice way?

Because I march in the women's marches and make calls to my representatives? Because I've been to ACLU meetings at stranger's houses and talked to the person who is running for Congress in my district and met face to face with a representative at the Ohio Statehouse and told him my story about how Planned Parenthood saved my life? Because I parked myself at the Farmer's Market with a petition to end gerrymandering in Ohio and persuaded random people to sign it?

My husband may have a point.

The funny thing is I wasn't always a radical. When I was in college, I barely read the news. I didn't vote. When I saw kids protesting on campus, a small gathering of the fringiest of the fringe carrying signs against Apartheid, I hustled by fast, averting my eyes, thinking, What a buncha weirdos.

and then off I went to a frat party. Once, when I was home for the summer and working at a law office downtown, President Reagan came to speak in the town square. I hadn't known he was coming. My mother was dropping me off at the law office, and she had to let me out blocks away because the entire downtown was cordoned off.

I was annoyed, and then afraid, when I had to explain to the Secret Service that I was trying to get to work, and then having my purse searched and wanded with a metal detector. At lunchtime, in the law office, one of the attorneys said, Let's go hear Ronald Reagan, and I shrugged, but went. There was a huge crowd and I stood there bored, not listening to the speech,

and then I was mortified when the attorney, a young woman only a few years older than me but light years ahead in maturity and education, began to boo loudly. The people around us threw us both dirty looks and shifted away, and I shifted away too because that attorney was the radical.

Not me.

Except okay,  I did write a letter to the editor of the newspaper when I was fifteen in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, and another person wrote back and called me out by name, basically saying I was an idiot for wanting women's rights. It turned out that the person was my history teacher,

a nun at my school, and she berated me in class and said in so many words

I was a radical. So, maybe there is some truth to the label?

Yesterday I rode with a friend downtown and marched on the snowy wet sidewalk, carrying my NO! sign, shuffling along with hundreds of other people, old women and men, younger women and men, some of them pushing babies in strollers, the babies wearing adorable pink pussy hats -- and I still CANNOT BELIEVE I AM WRITING THAT WORD, or saying the word SHITHOLE, but here we are,

our country,

being led by a sick man, an emperor with no clothes, and who knew there were so many people too cowardly to confront him?--

But yesterday, at least, there were some of us marching to the Ohio statehouse --where our leaders have recently been passing laws that seem like a page out of the Handmaid's Tale--

all of us shouting and waving our signs, chanting my favorite chant, which seems like a radical statement these days, but that's okay because

apparently,

I am a radical.

Why I March in the Women's March

I am going to the Women's March in DC this Saturday

because this election and the upcoming administration feels like an assault on everything I believe.

I wanted to make a protest sign to articulate all of my thoughts, all of my reasons for protesting.

I say

No-- to a man who boasts about grabbing women and girls by their private parts, who views women and girls as objects to rate and denigrate, who thinks it's disgusting when women breastfeed or have to go to the bathroom, who jokes about dating his own daughter, who calls women he doesn't like pigs, who parades into dressing rooms of underage girls and thinks that's funny and his right because he was born wealthy

No-- to a man who mocks people who have disabilities

No-- to a man who disparages people of color and people who are Muslim and people from other countries and people who are refugees and immigrants

No-- to a man who encourages his supporters to look at others with suspicion, to harm others, to bully others

No-- to a man who calls veterans losers and insults the parents of war heroes who gave their lives for this country and shows disdain for soldiers who suffer from PTSD

No-- to a man who threatens journalists, who wants to silence his critics

No-- to a man who shows contempt for Science, who doesn't believe in Climate Change

No-- to a man who tweets insults and bullies citizens who disagree with him

No-- to a man who surrounds himself with white supremacists, who takes advice from billionaires and Oligarchs and Russian leaders

No-- to a man who mocks the poor

No-- to a man who misleads his supporters, who makes promises he can't possibly keep, who wants to make America great again but can't explain what that means or WHEN that means and refuses to level with his supporters that it is impossible to go back to a mythical time when everything was "great" because everything WASN'T great for everyone.

No-- to a narcissist who can't empathize with anyone but himself, who has done real damage to most of the people he has come in contact with-- black people who he denied apartments to, women he sexually assaulted, workers he refused to pay, students he misled in his fake university, and all of us he has lied to-- about his status as a billionaire, about who he owes money to, about his multiple bankruptcies, about his many scams, about his entanglements with Russia--

But, all of that wouldn't fit on my sign.

So I just wrote this:

When I return from the March, the real work begins. That is when I will say Yes to actively working against him and every monstrous thing he stands for.