Public Comment

WOW!!! The women’s march in Oakland, on a Saturday called Jan. 21. At 1 pm, a march monitor tells me, “they estimate 60,000.” 7 pm, Channel 7 reports upwards of 84,000 people. Eighty Four Thousand. Please forgive me. I had to write it out in order to give my fingers a bit of the ecstacy that my mind feels. But then, 11 pm, Channel 5, “the police have revised their estimate, now up to 100,000.” WOW. 

In San Francisco, another 100,000, filling Market St. to the brim. In Chicago, there were a hundred and fifty thousand (150,000). In DC, a half a million. Across the country, over 600 cities graced by the presence in motion of the dignity, the humor, the inventiveness, and the rage of the women. And those of us who are non-women, but who try to add what we can to what has been set in motion. Millions nationwide, and more millions globally. 

What has been set in motion? A leap to our collective feet to beat down those who pretend to political elitism, whose who would use their position in a political structure to disparage whole peoples, to denigrate whole genders, to derogate whole sectors of the US population, to threaten whole ethnicities that try to find a home among us. And to heap contempt on all those who would be critical and on those who would stand up for the dignity and self-respect of humans. A Hundred Thousand people in Oakland alone. 

We fought to get where we are, to a place that is a road toward where people enter dialogue rather than command obedience, a place free of slavery, a place free of racial discrimination, a place free of masculinist violence and patriarchal hegemony. We haven’t gotten there, because the job is so big that a mere half century (not to mention 300 years) is not enough to finish it. But as long as we find a way to live shoulder to shoulder rather than toe to toe, we know we will get there. As one sign said, “we didn’t come this far to ONLY come this far.” 

But why had there been something to come this far from, in the first place? Insofar as we have been building a sense of humanity against bigotry, against murder, deceit, and exclusion, we cannot forget that former place from which we emerge. But we cannot take that as our tradition. To have taken this long journey means what we have been building hadn’t been there back then. What is a tradition and a history if they have to be created as we go along? Ask the women, for they are the guardians of tradition, and they are the ones inventing it right now. 

Still, there has come some loud mouth who finds it in his spleen and liver to derogate what we find in our hearts as a vision of sisterhood and brotherhood, and gets himself selected to be the mouthpiece of the political past, the one in which so many of us could not find ourselves. He is there to threaten us. We know why he is there to threaten us. It is because our struggle against verticle political stratification, against the racializations of white nationalism, against the discriminatory attitudes toward the “other-du-jour” that political and corporate hegemonies depend on, threaten them. But we don’t threaten them. It is our natural bent toward equality and democracy, and the justice that those demand, that threaten them. It is our natural tendency toward cooperation and unity that they attack in order to say, in one breath, cooperation is criminal, and people don’t naturally cooperate or unite. They attack our movements with post-Cointelpro campaigns with its hundreds of political prisoners, and then say that it is human nature to fail at collective endeavor. 

But the truth of the matter is that they who run this society cannot stand the presence of equality, the structures of democracy where we the people make political decisions for ourselves, and expect our representatives to honor them and carry them out. No, they insist on making decisions for themselves, and then expect us to carry them out. 

It is in terms of that ethos that Trump played the electoral vote game. The separation of the electoral vote from the popular vote is in the constitution itself. It was put there as a way of preserving parity among the states rather than let the more populous dominate the more sparcely populated. It has become a states-rights arena. Nevertheless, it beckons with a suggestion to turn it around and use the state’s autonomy, which means our own sense of ourselves, against the federal juggernaut. 

Let us roll up our sleeves and get to work together to preserve the softness and sensitivities of our human being against this machine that has made itself extant at the highest levels of government – a government that we have acceeded to up until now, up until this travesty has happened. And now we see what it is capable of, and not. 

To have been in that crowd, to have smiled at all those faces, never seen before, but among whom one finds friends, is a pure cool breeze on a hot day, an atmospheric embrace that allowed the few drops of water that fell to be seen as life for our planet, and not just rain. 

Steve Martinot