O Strange New World

"O brave new world that has such people in it. Let's start at once"

-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

My sister pulls up at 8:15 on the morning of January 21st. She comes to my front door juggling two coffees, rain jackets, and the sheet of cardstock she’d labored over the afternoon before. On one side, in flowing cursive she practiced in pencil— draw and erase, draw and erase— and finally filled in with thick marker strokes: “Respect Our Existence or Expect Resistance.” On the reverse, an equality symbol and rainbow resistance fist encircled with “You Haven’t Seen Nasty Yet.” My sister is 22 years old and Barack Obama is the only President she’s known as an adult. On November 8th, 2016 she texted me with increasing distress from across the city as our country elected the grotesque embodiment of fear, hatred, misogyny, and unbridled white rage. Now, she is ready to fight.

We both packed our bags with care, unsure of how the day would unfold. Bandannas, scarves, and a quart of milk in case there is tear gas. Gauze, Band-Aids, and ibuprofen in case of injury. An emergency contact number in permanent marker scrawled on an arm or leg just in case our phones are taken or lost. We’ve disabled location services and removed our thumbprint access codes. We’ve studied our protest rights.

“You ready?” I ask, shrugging into my pack.
“Let’s do this.”

By 9am the trolley depot on Massachusetts is teeming with pink pussy hats and picket signs. There’s a quiet, humming undercurrent of energy in the gathered crowd. Every woman I make eye contact with offers a nod or smile of solidarity. A girl, maybe 10 years old, scrambles out of a car clutching her sign and beaming a smile of pure, delighted anticipation rushes to the platform to wait for the trolley. As it rolls up and grumbles to a stop, we can see people and signs packed tight into each car. The doors slide open and we’re greeted with shouts of “We’re full! All full! We’ll see you down there!” The doors slide closed, and they’re off.

We call an Uber.

The driver drops us off in front of House of Blues, which we estimated was a safe enough distance from the Civic Center to avoid traffic congestion. Still, we only have to walk one block to see the amassing crowd. Soon we’re swallowed up in a swirling diversity of people. There are signs demanding healthcare, equal pay, and reproductive rights. A snake-headed uterus hisses from its Fallopian tubes, “Don’t Tread On Me.” A gigantic Trump puppet is held aloft, his papier-mâché pants “on fire” for the world to see. An upside-down American flag flies at half-mast. Again and again there are rallying cries for love, kindness, justice, unity.

The march begins, the crowd carrying us down Broadway. At each intersection we can glance to the left or the right to see parallel streets similarly flooded with people. Behind us, perched on her father’s shoulders, a little girl chants through a megaphone, “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!” Her father hides his face behind sunglasses and a red bandanna, but she is all pig-tails and baby teeth and innocence. Occasionally her attention wanders and she lapses into freestyle renditions of the Everywhere We Go cadence, or one particularly grim rendition of “It’s Raining It’s Pouring” where she continuously intones “He didn’t get up in the morning, he didn’t get up in the morning, he didn’t get up in the morning…”

At one point, we walk beside an elderly woman. She leans hard into her walker. Her head looks impossibly heavy, but every time she lifts it she’s smiling at us cheerfully. Her voice is not strong enough to match her spirit, so when the crowd chants she relies on the clown horn she’s installed on her walker handle.

“Show me what democracy looks like!”
“This is what democracy looks like!”
Honk-a, honk-a, honk-a, honk-a!

Thankfully, the protest is peaceful. People are laughing and chanting. They’re chatting with strangers. Taking videos and photos and marveling about the turnout. People seem hopeful; emboldened by this outpouring of support. When we reach the end of the march route, we mill about for a while.  There are no speeches or musical numbers or celebrity appearances. There’s no radical figurehead whipping the crowd into a frenzy. There is only a quiet sense of determination; the knowledge that the march is over but the work has just begun.

Tonight I’m writing this with my unopened quart of milk returned safely to the fridge, watching videos and photos stream in from sister marches across the world. Today we marched. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the next we continue to resist. This is the same world, but today it feels different and I like to imagine it growing and building on itself the way we grow and build from the foundation of our predecessors. Which is why I want to say, borrowing the foundation of Aldous Huxley, who borrowed the foundation of Shakespeare: "O strange new world, with such brave people in it. Let us start at once."

All my love, darlings.

-b