Saturday will bring the Women’s March on Washington and more than 600 sister marches around the country and around the world. It’s going to be big. The location of the Chicago march had to be changed to accommodate an increase in the size of the expected crowd. In Washington, D.C., location of the original event:
Metro will open two hours early Saturday and add extra trains to accommodate the thousands of people expected to attend the Women’s March on Washington, an event that could draw larger crowds than Inauguration Day and present travel challenges for participants and residents.
The D.C. event has a long list of speakers and musicians announced.
The march plans have been met by right-wing rage, media concern-trolling about whether celebrities are bad messengers, some infighting … and a whole lot of people planning to get out in the streets.
Let’s be clear: It’s not enough to march. March attendance could dwarf inauguration attendance, could swamp the streets of every major city in the country and a good number of small ones, and it still wouldn’t create lasting change if the people who march don’t also commit to go home and spend the next months and years organizing and staying active. But the experience of marching with tens or hundreds of thousands of like-minded people can motivate people into longer-term political commitments. Ann Friedman wrote recently about how the 2004 March for Women’s Lives did that for her, and:
As I gear up to march on the capitol with hundreds of thousands of protesters again, on the surface it feels like we’re back where we started: Futilely screaming against another president with a disregard for the powerless, who was elected without a majority. I have no illusions that this year’s Women’s March on Washington will change Donald Trump’s beliefs about who is worthy of living in the United States, whose body parts have the right to remain un-grabbed, and who is deserving of access to safety-net programs. But I am certain that it will change the people who show up. We don’t just march to change policies. We march to change ourselves. The act of transforming our political beliefs into something concrete — a sign we carry, a message we shout — transforms us.
So march. But when you go home, don’t think, “I marched, I did my part.” Think “what next? How can I make the political future better?”
Find a group of Daily Kos marchers here.