At least 10,000 people showed up in the Cambridge Commons today. We filled the place up, anyhow. It was a happy, diverse, articulate crowd. There were speakers, but I don’t know who most of them were, and I couldn’t hear them anyway. I was too busy taking photos of the creative and witty signs, and writing down my favorites. Here are a few:
Yes, I’m still mad.
Empowered women empower women.
Marching straight to the polls!
My cardio: running, cycling, smashing the patriarchy.
I’m with her…and her…and her…
You can’t comb over racism and misogyny.
“My button’s bigger than yours” is not a foreign policy statement.
Girls just want to have FUNdamental rights.
Fire the liar.
Feminazis against actual Nazis.
Women will clean the House – and the Senate.
Will trade racists for refugees.
One year in = 50 years back.
#whohasn’tbeen?
Ikea has better cabinets.
You haven’t SEEN nasty yet.
Grab ‘em by the Midterms.
First we marched, now we run.
My Rwandan husband thinks I am the one from a shithole country.
Massholes against Assholes.
2017: the Resistance. 2018: the Resurgence.
All in all, he’s just another prick for a wall.
Tweet women with respect.
The seas are rising and so are we.
Pussies for progress.
He asked me, What’s your favorite position? I said CEO.
There is no Planet B.
This being Cambridge, the nerds were there in force. One marcher held a sign saying “Angry Librarian.” There were math jokes: 4 + 5 = NEIN! … 44 > 45… = > ÷ …and Harry Potter jokes: If we’re going to vanquish Voldemort, we need more Hermiones. Also jokes I didn’t get, like This episode of Black Mirror sucks. And lots of pictures of Wonder Woman, as well as vicious and imaginative caricatures of our president, and hearts and rainbows and peace signs and bedazzling.
People were there to support Dreamers, Democrats, immigrants, people of color, transgender people, the EPA, prisoners, Mother Earth, abortion rights, and real news. People were there to fight not only Trump but his entire agenda. Some signs carefully listed dozens of issues on which probably everyone present considered him an evil influence. Martin Luther King quotes abounded. There were eloquent sayings: Lying is done with words and also with silence; When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty; Her wounds came from the same source as her power. There were also signs from people who hardly knew where to begin, including Ugh! I can’t even! and C’MON.
Among the sea of pussy hats were many dogs, usually wearing signs of their own, a tyrannosaurus rex (huge predator with tiny hands), and several women in Handmaid’s Tale costumes. A group of young girls held up “They thought they could bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” One baby snuggled in a backpack that said “Even when I nap…I stay woke.” An old white man: “Rid the government of old white men.” A young man: “Please allow me to mansplain nothing.”
The protest dissolved after a couple of hours. It was relatively warm for a winter day in Boston, so people were in no hurry to leave. An impromptu dance party on a corner of Harvard Square drew a couple of hundred people. People waved their hands in the air and formed a conga line to Dancing Queen and Latin pop tunes. Leftover signs got propped in the iron railings around an old cemetery in the Square. One little girl refused to let her mother put up one of the signs she’d made. She wanted to keep all six of them. It’s history, I said to her mom, and took their picture.