Inspired and activated, newly minted activists plan for their future
On January 21, the day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, millions of women around the world and their supporters joined together to participate in the Women’s March on Washington D.C., or one of the dozens of sister marches taking place all over the world. We profiled four local marchers and now that they’ve come home they’re turning their eyes to the future and figuring out what the future holds.
Pamela Deas lives in Healdsburg, and traveled to the march in Washington DC. “It was an amazing day,” she said. “It wasn’t physically taxing, but I was so exhausted by 6 o’clock because it was so emotional. I basically had to stop myself from weeping the entire time. Somebody would start a chant and I’d start to chant and then I’d hear all these voices around me and I’d choke up. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.”
Susan Kendall also went to Washington, traveling from Cloverdale. “I’m really glad we went to Washington,” she said. “There was something special about people coming to DC to say: ‘This is important enough that we are stopping our lives and spending our money, because we want you to know we are watching you, and we are putting you on notice. This is a minority that voted you in, and you don’t represent us.’”
Chelsea Rickard drove from Geyserville and then took the Larkspur ferry with friends to the march in San Francisco. “When we got on the ferry everybody was wearing a pink hat. It was pretty amazing, already there was chanting and while we were waiting to get on, a lady got up and started talking and getting everybody excited,” she said. “It was just awesome.”
Juliana LeRoy made the relatively short trip from Windsor to Santa Rosa, but she still felt like she was part of a global movement. “I have friends that were at the San Francisco march or Oakland march and everybody I’ve heard from had the same experience – a lightening of the gloom, a day of, ‘You know what, there is hope and there is connectiveness.’”
All four women spoke in glowing terms of the positive experience of the marches, the range of marchers from every walk of life and their total amazement of the sheer numbers of marchers in every location. They also shared the experience of realizing that they were representing not just themselves but the people who couldn’t march but supported the message.
“That’s actually the other thing that really struck me,” Deas said. “There were so many people supporting the march. There were five times as many people supporting the march as were able to march. Every single service person I spoke to, the waitresses the security guards all wanted to know why I was in town and when I told them and every single one of them thanked me for marching. It was surprising.”
Deas and Rickard both experienced this sense of representation when they were gifted with the famous pink “pussy hats,” Deas by a woman on her plane and Rickard by two acquaintances who were too elderly to attend the march.
All the women now face the questions of “What next?” and “Where do we go from here?”
LeRoy is planning to attend an event this weekend called the Community Engagement Fair (see sidebar) in order to find ways to work within her local community. But the others struggle with these questions. “I’m still struggling with that,” Kendall admitted. “I’m getting tired of signing ten petitions a day on whitehouse.gov. I despair of that as I don’t know it does any good. I’m looking to see what’s being planned to see what I can get involved in.
“One thing I’m interested in is the idea of helping with sister districts,” she continued. “Which is when you adopt a swing district and get involved in voter registrations.”
“I intend to keep up the pressure and encourage everybody to keep up the pressure, to attend and host nonviolent resistant workshops. I will continue to call and write and fuss and make a stink and march and encourage everyone around me. And, put my money where my mouth is and make monthly contributions to the organizations that are helping with this,” Deas said, who is also considering attending the upcoming Scientists March on April 29 and the March For Taxes on April 15.
“I think that what I take away from it is that you have to be involved – so I’ve joined a couple of action oriented groups, writing to congressmen and women and continuing to do other marches and continue to be a person in my own community who stands up for people’s civil rights,” said Rickard. “To not be complacent and be involved – be involved locally, and be involved in your city government and your county government and also with our federal government.”
All four marchers shared a common thread – that they have not previously been activists of any stripe and feel the current political climate has awakened them. But now that they are awake, they are not going back to sleep.
