We are warriors, and the future is female.

Flash back one year: January 20, 2017.

I was in a van full of women driving to the Women’s March, on my way to an experience I’ll never forget.

Living in a rural red congressional district, too often progressive voices are silent or scorned. I was exhausted and depressed after months of trying to come to terms with the hate in the world and how far we hadn’t come. Daily, it was a rude awakening to see the world and community I thought I lived in did not really exist, how people who taught my children not to bully and how to serve their community were inexplicably happy to turn over the reins of governance to a reality TV star billionaire whose fame came about through being crude, shocking, deceitful and being willing to call people names.

For various reasons, I didn’t find it easy to get to the march. But it felt like a duty –like something I had no choice but to do.

It was only the night before, still in warrior mode, that I suddenly knew: the Woman’s March wouldn’t be like a fight.

It would be like flying. It would be easy. It would be like singing a song: thousands of women expressing the values we were born with, embodying the feminine divine. It would be love. It would be truth. It would be coming together.

And it was. To see so many more people than anticipated, pouring into the street to show strength in numbers…to grieve what we had lost, and what we would never stop fighting for….to stand in a huge crowd that included not only women of all ages, but young children who would inherit our world and men who chose to stand together in the fight for a better world…to hear strong voices sharing sorrow and hope and affirming the vision and values of a brighter future…it was deeply healing.

It was the first time in months the world once again felt RIGHT.

****

Flash forward to today, one year later.

In a few days, women will return to the streets for an anniversary march, and I wonder what will unfold.

The past year has brought a new shock every day: the Muslim ban, the slashing of Bear Ears national park, retreat from the Paris climate accord, the mainstreaming of tiki torches in Charlottesville wielded by “very fine people”, the death of Heather Heyer, the reports of deportation, the string of implications from the Russia investigation, the Twitter wars with North Korea over nuclear weapons, the presidential comment about sh!th@ole countries that made us turn off the news because our children were present.

Many of us have made a full or partial retreat from social media, no longer willing to start each day with the knowledge of a new drama, a new dashing of hopes, an additional anguishing revelation about what your neighbors really think, a few more edges crumbling away from your former world view.

After all that, we are tired.

I wonder if the shock, the despair, the determination that brought so many people into the streets last year has been worn away. If we’ve been dampened by the knowledge that no matter how many of us stand together, the great American reality show continues. Maybe, I think, we are tired to the point where, out of self-preservation, we have given up on taking any of this seriously.

Then again, I think: no. Something has crystallized.

Today we are tired, but we are wiser. Today we know we may need to pick our battles, but we also know what they are.

In a way, this knowledge is a gift. Now we know who we are, and what must be done.

We are warriors, and the future is female.

 

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