The streets swelled with bodies and noise and raw electric fury, not the manufactured kind you get from some corporate sponsored spectacle, but the genuine article, the kind that rises from the gut when people realize silence is complicity. San Francisco, Market Street, and the air itself seemed charged with purpose, thick with the understanding that democracy isn’t some passive inheritance: it’s a muscle you work or watch atrophy.
These weren’t tourists clutching lattes and taking selfies (though sure, some of that too). This was mothers and daughters, grandmothers who’d seen this fight before, young women who refused to see it again. Signs handmade with fury and wit, the kind of homespun defiance that no PR team could manufacture. Pink hats everywhere like a unified middle finger to anyone who thought this moment would pass quietly.
The thing about a march like this: it’s messy and imperfect and sometimes the messaging gets muddled in the chaos. But that’s the point. It’s not meant to be clean. Revolution, even the incremental, democratic kind, never is. It’s supposed to make you uncomfortable, supposed to disrupt brunch and traffic and the careful equilibrium of people who’d rather not think about what’s broken.
You could feel the collective exhale, the release of pent up rage and determination. All those voices refusing to stay small, refusing to whisper when screaming was required. The city became a megaphone. And whether it changed minds or policy, who knows? But it changed the people marching. Made them visible to themselves, reminded them they weren’t alone in the visceral understanding that some things are worth fighting for, even when the fight feels endless.
I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.”
I began to ask each time: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, “disappeared” or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.
Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.
And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
Audre Lorde
Women’s March, 2018
San Francisco