At Women’s Marches, love trumps hate
She was wearing one of those Love Trumps Hate buttons that became popular during a presidential campaign so acrimonious that at times the slogan seemed pure fantasy.
But Laura Martinez of Albuquerque was ever the optimist. She still believed in the message of the button. Last weekend, as we prepared to join the millions on the move at the Women’s March on Washington and its 673 sister marches around the world, that button seemed the perfect accessory.
If you joined, too, you got that feeling.
If you joined, you were part of what is being hailed as one of the largest days of protest of any kind in U.S. history.
If you joined, you helped exceed all predictions and did so peacefully and without violence. On Saturday, it felt like love had trumped hate.
Organizers in Washington, D.C., had expected 200,000 pink-hatted and purposeful women (and men) to show up. Instead,
an estimated 500,000 came — men, women and families.
In New Mexico, about 1,700 had pledged on Facebook to attend the sister march in Albuquerque about a week before the event. On Saturday, widely varying estimates pinned attendance on Civic Plaza from 3,000 to 6,000.
The Las Cruces event attracted about 1,500 participants, according to published crowd estimates.
Even in New Mexico’s smaller communities, especially those in bright-red areas that voted for Donald Trump, turnout exceeded expectations. In Fort Sumner, a rural eastern New Mexico village with a population under 1,000, organizer Alexis Roth said she feared she might be marching alone. Roth said some had discouraged her from holding a march at all.
“They told me my husband could lose his job over this, we might be run out of town, people would stop talking to me and there might even be violence,” she said. “But that’s why it was important to march — to show we are not afraid, that we won’t be intimidated, that being inclusive and uplifting can be unifying and powerful.” That love can trump hate. On Saturday, 16 people showed up, one man traveling from Clovis to march in support of his daughter marching in Washington.
“That may not seem like many,” Roth said. “But for our little town, it was amazing.”
About 50 people showed up in Deming, another Trump stronghold, marching until wintry winds nearly blew participants away.
“We almost had to end it then,” organizer July McClure said. “But then a woman in the group stepped up with keys to an old building big enough to accommodate us, so we continued in there. It was one of those things you couldn’t plan better.”
Weather was also a concern for march organizer Lindsay Conover in Santa Fe, where snow had fallen overnight and continued to fall Saturday morning.
Conover said she would have been happy with a crowd of 3,000. Instead, about 11,000 marchers showed up, according to police. The sun showed up, too. “It was beyond anything I imagined,” Conover said. “It turned out to be a beautiful day.”
Martinez, she of the Love Trumps Hate button, was there, too. The button, pinned to a plaid scarf, started many a conversation, including one with a sweet, small woman with smiling blue eyes named Mary Kaine.
Kaine and her husband, Al, were on vacation from Kansas City and staying at the same hotel as Martinez. She learned about the sister march in Santa Fe from others in the hotel and decided to march, too.
Kaine, we later learned, is the mother of Tim Kaine, a U.S. senator from Virginia, Hillary Clinton’s running mate and the man who would have been vice president had things turned out differently in November.
Had things turned out differently, there would not have been a Women’s March on Washington. There would not have been a peaceful wave of women finding their voice, some for the first time. Sometimes, it takes a jolt of reality on one side to energize the other. There has been a lot of hate thrown around on both sides. Sometimes, it takes the hate to energize the love.
If you joined, too, you got that feeling. If you didn’t, perhaps you will accept that the millions in the streets protesting peacefully and purposefully marched for everyone.
After the march, Martinez noticed that somehow in the excitement she had lost the plaid scarf on which she had pinned her Love Trumps Hate button.
That button is gone now, but Martinez doesn’t need it anymore. She knows the meaning it carried is true, because she saw it in the faces of the people she marched with.