‘This Is The Upside of The Downside’: Women’s March Finds Hope in Defiance

Katy Perry attend the rally at the Women’s March on Washington with politician Cory Booker..

 

Washington, 23 Rabiul Akhir 1438/22 January 2017 (MINA) – Enormous gatherings across America, and around the world, have brought a palpable sense of solidarity to resist Donald Trump’s backward-looking agenda

Anarchists in black masks who disrupted Donald Trump’s inauguration day gave way to an ocean of pink hats and exuberant – though defiant – women who gathered in their hundreds of thousands on Saturday.

The Women’s March on Washington descended on the US capital, while in hundreds of cities across America and around the world women joined in a gesture of resistance against the new president’s first full day in office – bringing a palpable sense of solidarity and determination to resist a backwards-looking agenda, the guardian.com reported.

The crowds were of remarkable size in Boston, Chicago and New York. In Washington DC transport chiefs said 275,000 Metro trips had been made by 11am – compared to 193,000 by the same time on Friday. The rally in the capital had grown to an estimated 500,000-strong by midday.

Beneath the bubbly atmosphere, smiles and air-punching by women carrying often witty signs, their children, cameras and flags, the message was resoundingly against what speakers called “a platform of hate” offered by Trump.

Packed trains and roads clogged with buses full of women resulted in the capital, from its center to its outskirts, grinding to a halt with the sheer volume of people trying to reach the rally. The great influx stood in stark contrast to the relatively paltry turn-out for the inauguration ceremony and parade the day before.

 
Taking up a credo of hate”.

As speakers at the march warned of “a heart-wrenching time to be a woman”, a new mass movement began at the base of Capitol Hill on Saturday.

Latina activist and actress America Ferrera was the first of the A-list line-up to stand on stage and address the crowds rallying next to the National Mall along Independence Avenue.

Less than 24 hours before, near the same spot, Trump had delivered a brutal, sinister speech meant to whip up ordinary people against the Washington elites and rail against what he described as a dystopian scene of “American carnage” in the US, with crime, poverty, post-industrial decline, drug addiction and economic inequality blighting the landscape.

But Ferrera, her voice booming out yesterday morning from jumbotron screens set up for the packed crowds at the pre-march rally, was having none of it.

She called on the nation to reject and resist a president who “took up a credo of hate”.

“It’s been a heart-wrenching time to be a woman and an immigrant in this country – a platform of hate and division assumed power yesterday. But the president is not America … We are America,” she said.

 
We will all register as Muslims

Ferrera was followed by feminist activist Gloria Steinem, who said of Trump: “He said he was for the people… I have met the people and you are not them.”

She added: “ This is an outpouring of energy and true democracy that I have never seen in my very long life. It is wide in age, it is deep in diversity and remember the constitution does not begin with ‘I the president’ it begins with ‘we the people’.”

Referring to campaign rhetoric that could become foreign policy under the Trump administration, she told the crowd: “If you force Muslims to register, we will all register as Muslims.”

Protests coinciding with Friday’s inauguration had been disrupted with bursts of violence from masked protesters, who smashed windows and hurled objects at the police. At one point a limousine had its windows smashed and was set alight, with the unrest leading to more than 200 arrests.

On Saturday, the atmosphere was quite different. There is no doubting that the women and the many men who came to Washington in support are angry – and it is that anger that prompted the huge event, following Trump’s divisive campaign peppered with racism and misogyny, then his shock win.

But the mood at the rally and march was one of galvanizing people into action, with notes of celebration of the occasion. Banners were endowed with hearts, rainbows, unicorns, women’s symbols, anti-nuclear missile symbols, but there were also signs calling for Trump to be impeached and calling him Putin’s puppet.

Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Thanks for standing, speaking & marching for our values @womensmarch. Important as ever. I truly believe we’re always Stronger Together.”

And not far from the heart of the rally, stood four women clad in winter coats in front of a paper banner that read “Gloria Allred – Women Seeking Justice Against Trump.”

More than a million people were expected to attend “sister” marches in more than 300 US cities, and in total many millions in more than 600 locations globally, from Hungary to New Zealand to Mexico and beyond.

By noon in Washington, the official estimate by the march organizers of attendees at the event so far had reached 500,000 – twice as many as the pre-march official estimate. Barack Obama’s last secretary of state, John Kerry, was seen marching in the capital, drawing thunderous roars of approval from onlookers. (T/RS05/RS01)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)

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