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Amnesty @ WLU's take on human rights
1/29/2017 0 Comments Making History with Pink HatsAll you could see when you got off at the metro and stepped into the sharp DC air was a sea of pink hats and large signs. You could barely move as people crowded around you, pushing in every generation, nobody quite sure where we were supposed to be walking to. A lot of people, including myself, stopped every five feet to snap a quick photo of a sign they couldn’t resist not documenting. Vendors selling Hillary pins and anti-Trump merchandise filled the streets, squeezing in between food trucks. There was no direction to look towards that wasn’t clogged with human bodies; nobody knew where they were going because you could only see so far. I have been in Disney World when a new ride has just opened in the dead of summer, to South Beach during the spring season and New York in July. I thought I had a pretty solid idea of what a crowd looked like. I am so pleased to report that the Women’s March on Washington very promptly turned that idea upside down. The crowds were so large that you could barely breathe, and it was in the most marvelous way. You were pressed up against strangers in the biting cold and were hit every once in a while by a Planned Parenthood sign that had flopped down from someone’s raised arms, but there was no room to be upset. I couldn’t be upset about any of it. I found nothing in me to be angry that we didn’t march, or even more than slightly annoyed at those who yelled over the speakers. I didn’t have the mental capacity to process how much I needed to go to the bathroom or how cold I was or how I was really tired of the weight on my neck from my camera I’d brought to document an event that looked nothing like I expected it to be. Every part of my mind was absorbed instead in understanding the magnitude of what I was a part of that day. I was standing among over 500,000 women by conservative estimates in our capitol, united by one thing and one thing only: the realization that we could not stay at home while our president threatened the lives of women, refugees, immigrants, the poor, and people of color in our nation. We were all there for different reasons, from different places, and from different backgrounds. And we all had something or someone to march for. I was there not only for myself, but for my favorite little 4-year-old girl in the world. I wasn’t just marching for my rights, but for hers. I was fighting for my reproductive rights, my humanity, my ability not to fear rape every time it falls past 9pm on a weekend so that she wouldn’t have to. I was fighting to close the wage gap, to end stereotyping, and to halt the war on women so that she wouldn’t have to. Because if we’re being honest, we shouldn’t have to fight anymore. This fight should have ended a long time ago. But that doesn’t matter. Because even if we’re still fighting a hundred years from now, one thing is for certain: we are going to win. ~Maya Lora '20, [email protected]
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