I’m not a joiner and certainly not an activist, yet today I’ll drive myself and my daughter to Washington, D.C., to march in the Women’s March on Saturday. I don’t have a pink pussy hat or a T-shirt, but my presence will be my sign of protest against the new administration. Dozens of my friends are also going to DC or marching in their own cities. One of my friends, Debra Gordon, and healthcare writer and activist, was quoted in Salon about why women are marching this weekend. She gave her answer; here’s mine.
My daughter and I are going to add our small voices and two bodies and four hands and four feet to the tens or hundreds of thousands, to the millions of small voices and bodies and hands and feet that will be chanting, clapping, and marching in protest of a government that seems poised to lead our nation toward disaster. It’s not that the incoming Administration is a Republican one. Although I’m a proud liberal, I was raised in a Republican household and still believe that individuals are responsible for their own success in life. As I’ve grown older (and wiser), however, I’ve come to recognize that institutionalized bias against minorities and women exists, so while individuals are responsible for their own success, they aren’t necessarily responsible for their own failures. I learned this first-hand when a boss–a generally good boss–refused to raise my salary to the same level as an older male colleague. My male counterpart and I held the same title, and my boss acknowledged that his work was inferior to mine, but he would not give me a raise because the man “had a family.” I wasn’t asking for special treatment, I was asking for equal pay based on merit–you can’t get more Republican than that. Yet institutional bias not only kept me from getting my raise, it had me meekly accepting my boss’s refusal as “reasonable.”
I refuse to accept this paradigm now, which is why I’m marching tomorrow. We face a government that will likely undermine our universal education system, which is the foundation our country’s greatness. Education is already widely undervalued, contributing to widespread misunderstanding and under-appreciation for science. Hence, the mistrust of scientists which contributes to the rejection of climate change legislation. Reversing what little we’ve done to stall climate change, and doing nothing more to address it, will surely endanger my daughter’s generation and their descendants. There’s nothing reasonable about that.
I’m not a joiner and not an activist. I’ve never called a politician’s office, or stuffed an envelope during an election. To be honest, I’ve skipped voting in many, many off-year elections. But for me, Saturday’s March will be the first steps in a new paradigm of resistance to the current Administration as a means of restoring the principle, and hopefully the practice, of equal footing for all.
AM Justice 
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