People’s March, DC, January 18, 2025

Saturday, January 18, 2025

Saturday my brother Andy and I joined the People’s March in DC.  The weather was cold, but moderate, with dirty ice on the sidewalks.  Snow is forecast for Sunday, and bitter 10-degree cold for Monday.  On account of the coming cold snap Trump has moved the Monday Inauguration indoors to the Capitol Rotunda and canceled the Parade, leaving 220,000 ticket holders without access.  (One wag asked why a man so afraid of the cold wants to buy Greenland).  There will be a watch party at the Capital One Arena, which has a capacity of only 20,000 — so the other 200,000 who traveled to DC for the event will be turned away.  

We protesters gather in three parks close to the Capitol and flow together on the march route, which ends with a walk down the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial.  The crowd around the Reflecting Pool extends all the way back toward the Washington Monument.  The pool is frozen over. 

The main driver of this People’s March has been the Women’s March, which as we all remember thronged the capitol in 2017 to protest Trump’s first presidency.  With over a million protesters in concurrent marches nationwide, that 2017 event is estimated to have been the largest single-day protest in US history. 

Today there are far fewer people in DC than in 2017 — about 90% fewer (50,000 today vs 470,000 then).  In 2017, I was in Oakland and took BART to the march.  I came out from the 19th Street station into warmest, most positive, and most supportive protest I’d ever attended, dating back to the 70’s.  I felt a surge of joy and belonging:  parents and children and grandmothers and great-grandmothers, couples and groups of friends, pussy hats galore.  We were young and the Resistance was full of promise.  Today’s march, by contrast, feels flat — almost as if we’re going through the motions, perfunctory. 

In form and function the march today is similar to the two I attended this summer at the Republican and Democratic Conventions – though the focus today is Women’s issues, while the summer marches together seemed one long agonized cry of pain about the massacre in Gaza.  There are messages of resistance throughout DC:  the AFL-CIO and other unions hoisted defiant 30-foot-tall banners outside their offices, and the giant “BLACK LIVES MATTER” slogan remains on the pavement mere blocks from the White House.  Other signs and slogans from the march:

• It CAN Happen Here
• When a Clown Moves into the Palace, he does not become king, Instead the Palace becomes a circus
• Hate Will not Make us Great
• Class War Now
• Heal, not Heil
• He’s Not My President
• Let Kids Play
• America:  WTF?
• Action is the Antidote to Despair

There are a few counter protesters and clumps of curious MAGA folk around the periphery.  At one point Park Police escort a squad of pro-lifers as they stride through the crowd, chanting hellfire and damnation on a bullhorn – these are the same pro-lifers I had seen in Milwaukee, with the same gruesome blown-up photos of bloody fetuses.

There has been much written and said about how the Left has lost energy, drive, resolve and purpose.  The will to resist Trump 2.0 (according to this view) is nowhere near as ferocious and determined as Trump 1.0.  This may be true.  If so, numerous factors may have contributed.  Fatigue.  Splintering within the coalition.  Complacency after Biden’s win.  Shock and disbelief that someone with Trump’s heinous record could possibly be rehabilitated and reelected.  Confusion about what to do next and where to go for comfort.  Fear about the coming onslaught.  (“Winter is coming . . . “)

Well, there’s denying it:  WINTER IS HERE.  We’re in for four years of struggle, suffering, disappointments, losses, and setbacks.  Some of our friends will be deported.  Others will be discriminated against and will need sanctuary and succor and support.  Just as Roe v. Wade was rolled back, we may see other rights and freedoms taken away:  birthright citizenship, for example.  We should accept the reality of this situation and prepare for it the way we prepare for winter:  dress warmly, stay indoors whenever possible, hibernate, conserve our strength, get together with friends to celebrate the turning of the year, and be ready when the thaw comes.  Fight off the wolves when they come to the door.  Keep our powder dry, pick our battles, and prepare for the day when we take our country back.  

We have available to us many symbols and exemplars of endurance, resilience and perseverance.  Atlas, suffering with the weight of the world on his shoulders.  Sisyphus and Tantalus.  Job, Daniel, Ruth and Esther.  Saint Sebastian and Saint Stephen.  Bodhidharma sitting nine years before the wall and the Buddha searching for six.  In our own time, Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 18 years at Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, 27 years in all.  Black American heroes laboring for 100 years from the Civil War to the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964:  Frederick Douglass; Booker T. Washington; Ida Wells; W.E.B. DuBois; Malcolm X; Fannie Lou Hamer; Rosa Parks; James Baldwin; Bayard Rustin; A. Philip Randolph; Thurgood Marshall; Ella Baker . . .  and of course Martin Luther King.  Gandhi himself labored for 30 years to help secure India’s independence from England.   

Many of us have learned the lessons of perseverance in our own lives, the heavy labor of raising children, or nursing a friend back to health, or feeding a house full of people, or working 60 hours a week or more to feed and clothe your family and put a roof over their heads. Those of us who have sat a seven- or eight-day retreat know all too well agony of the sharks eating our knees on Day 4.  Our practice sustains us through that suffering, and helps us transform it, just as it transforms life’s other tribulations.

In “No Mud, No Lotus,” Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us that suffering is the ground of enlightenment, and without the one we can’t have the other — and in fact they are one and the same.  When you receive a cancer diagnosis you do your best to get well, and in the meantime you live your life in the present moment as fully as you can, and touch your friends and family.  There’s an old zen parable about a man who is walking in the jungle when he’s confronted by a tiger.  The man runs away, but is pursued by the tiger and soon finds himself at the edge of a precipice.  He jumps over the edge and catches a hanging vine. The tiger above him crouches at the edge of the cliff, menacing.  Below is another tiger snarling and leaping up and swinging his mighty paws.  Just then the man sees that a mouse has joined in and is gnawing at the vine, and soon it must break.  In this moment of crisis and panic, as he dangles in midair, the man spies a strawberry plant on a ledge, just beside him.  He reaches out, plucks the strawberry and eats it.  “Aaah!”  . . .

“Fall seven times, stand up eight,” goes a famous zen saying.   And Dogen taught us about Continuous Practice.  These are inspirations for us as we work through this dark period.   As our dear teacher Sojun Mel Weitsmen reminded us, again and again, the pendulum always swings back.  Trump too shall pass.