Women: Raise your voices
With challenging times ahead, we must remember ‘change can happen.’
Like many women, I woke up on Nov. 9 with a massive electoral hangover, one that looks like it will last the next four years. Today, my aching head is still trying to wrap itself around how a president who clearly denigrates and assaults women, and who has no understanding of basic civil rights or how government functions, has been elected. I remain gutwrenchingly sick that we have a Congress that appears hellbent on overturning all of the progress we’ve made in the past eight years.
My hangover remedy has been to take action. A day after the election, I founded The Next Four Years-Milwaukee to serve as a forum for people to share ways to get involved and influence our political process. We are now more than 4,000-members strong. Our first goal for TN4Y is to make our voices heard at the Women’s March on Washington.
On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of women and and men from all races, ethnicities, economic backgrounds and faiths will converge in Washington, D.C., in Madison and in cities around the country. This grassroots effort was started by Teresa Shook, a grandmother from Hawaii, who invited friends on Facebook to join her to march, and they invited friends, and so on and so on. One woman can make a difference; many together can make a movement. TN4Y is ready to join it. We’ve worked with award-winning artists to design posters and banners, secured bus transportation, and we’re going to the march to create change.
The message we will carry to our federal and state legislators and to our president-elect: We will fight to defend civil liberties, combat voter suppression, protect the environment, ensure affordable health care, raise the minimum wage, acknowledge climate change and maintain marriage equality. We are protesting the new administration’s plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act, to defund Planned Parenthood, to spend tens of billions of dollars on a wall with Mexico and to appoint so many unqualified nominees to the cabinet.
These demonstrations are for all people, not just liberals. Conservatives should come express their outrage that their party has been hijacked by a nepotistic reality TV star with authoritarian tendencies and thuggish Russian friends. They should protest the Koch brothers-funded legislative candidates who are willing to take their states to the brink of bankruptcy to enact their slate of regressive legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
When I ask women coming to the March what they are marching for, overwhelmingly they say they’re protesting for their children’s futures, to maintain our democracy and to be heard by their politicians.
Liza is coming on the bus to D.C. with
her mother and her two children, and here’s what she’s told her kids: “We are going to protest because it is important to let the world know that we are disappointed and angry about this election. We have a president-elect who brags about touching women inappropriately, who says terrible things about people because of their religious beliefs or where they were born, and who makes fun of people because of how they look. We have a vice president-elect who has built his career on making life more difficult for two-mom and two-dad families. And he’s made it much more difficult for women to get health care, especially the kind that helps them to not have babies until they are ready.”
Gabrielle is marching because “I want my kids to care and to know that it makes a difference if they are engaged. My children need to see that this election doesn’t just mean that if you insult others, talk the loudest, interrupt, lie about facts, not work hard, and repeat misinformation enough, that people will believe it, that others will just tune out, and you can do whatever you want. That is not the message I want to raise my son and daughter believing.”
Barbara has helped organize the bus trip, because she’s “afraid of what the future may be for democracy, for the rights of women and minorities. In the 1930s, Hitler ruled even though he only received 44% of the German vote. One of the first things he did was vilify and silence the press. I will not be silent.”
The history of the United States is inextricably bound up in political protest movements that have made a difference to the future of our country. In 1913, 8,000 suffragists, including Hellen Keller, marched to support women’s voting rights in the Woman Suffrage Procession, the day before President-elect Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. led 250,000 protestors on the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech. Without his powerful oration and this public show of support, Congress might never have passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As a college student in 1989, I took a train from Boston to Washington and attended the March for Women’s Lives. I saw firsthand the power that 800,000 women hold when joining together to demonstrate for reproductive rights.
The next four years are going to be the most challenging time in our lives, but as President Barack Obama recently stated, “Change can happen. The system will respond to ordinary people coming together to try to move the country in a better direction.” Join us to make yourself heard. Join us to make a difference.