fight like a girl

hey y'all,

Yesterday, I was a part of something that I'm going to tell my kids one day. Who knows? Maybe it will be in history textbooks in 50 years or 100 years. It might be a brief two liner under the heading Trump's Presidency, or a paragraph. Or maybe it's an event some kid in the future will do a project on. If so, I hope it's not just written on a strip of paper in a hat, and some kid just picks it out and groans, "this? Why did I get this?" I hope this kid chooses this topic.

I hope they go up to the teacher and ask, "Can I do my research on the Women's March?" And who knows? Maybe the teacher will ask: "Which one?" Maybe the teacher will know exactly which one and say "Of course. That's a great idea!" Maybe the teacher will say "Are you sure? Are you interested in it? Maybe there's something better." And if the teacher does say this, I hope the child is firm. And says "No, this is what I want to do." And I wonder, among these kids, how many of their grandparents or great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents marched along side thousands of powerful women (and men!). Well, I'd be happy to say I was one of them.

I wasn't originally going to go to the march, I'm not going to lie. Why did I go? Because my friends did. Would I have gone if they didn't? Nope. Am I proud of that answer? Nope. Yesterday was a first. The first time I was apart of something this big. My first march (and hopefully one of the only few I will have to attend as said by my parents' friend later that day) and my first activist movement. And boy, or should I say girl, it was AMAZING.

My favorite were the signs. Some of them held classic slogans like Love is Love, or Women's Rights are Human Rights. But there were some really creative signs out there. And even if the words were not creative, the images got very artistic (like cats with rainbow lasers shooting out of their eyes).

There isn't much to say without sounding cheesy or cliche, but there are a few things I can say that are unique to my own experience. So I go to school near where the march took place, so I pass the same streets everyday. Those streets will never

look the same again. The Boston Common will never look the same again. A piece of me will see thousands of signs raised to the sky and a sea of pink pussy hats, blurring us all together into one community with the same values. Even though it's painful to have to march simply for rights we should already have, I was thankful to be apart of something so moving and hopeful and peaceful.

-A