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Life: Together We Rise
Jan. 21st, 2017 08:45 pmJoined a march and rally today. There wasn't one locally (super small town, red state), but three different ones within a couple hours, including St Louis. The town where Sister K lives had one, and though a couple weeks ago, I had big concerns about its leadership and their choices RE intersectionality, they seemed to be willing to take the criticisms and make changes, so I did end up attending. They expected a few hundred last I heard yesterday; we clocked in at a few thousand, which is a huge deal in this area.
Sister K knitted us pussy hats (mine is a gorgeous, heavy blue yarn, and so freaking warm -- even though the weather was really too nice today to make it comfortable to wear), her husband marched with us, and the two of them carried gorgeous signs. (One of the national signs, and one a graphic design friend of hers designed). I made my own two-sided sign, very simple, and had it printed, because I don't do sign lettering very well. One side said, "Wolves and girls, both have sharp teeth," which is from Marjorie Lui's Black Widow: The Name of the Rose, in black lettering with two black wolf silhouettes. The other side said the following, with certain sections colored with markers (a rainbow around lgbtqia and silver and bronze on the top and bottom lines):
Equality for All
Black Lives Matter
LGBTQIA Rights
No Human is Illegal
Native Rights
Religious Freedom
Disability Rights
Healthcare = Human Right
Protect the Vulnerable
Together We Rise
I wanted to put so many more things on there, but I also wanted them to be easy to read from a distance, and I ran out of room. (I've never had a poster printed before, and this was the largest the print shop would do without going into specialty printing. I glued the printed papers onto neon rainbow poster board, and it all worked pretty great. (Particularly because during the rally, I faced the road because I couldn't handle having my back to that space, and turned the quality side out for people driving past, so I got to look at the wolf side, which is one of my inspirations each morning.
The event was okay. It had really great moments; I love marching alongside other people fighting for equal rights, particularly Sister K and Brother N. I had so many older queer couples, particularly gay men, come up to me to thank me for including them on the sign, and to whisper to me that we were family (I was one of the few people who specifically called out certain rights, at least from what I saw at the rally and what I've seen in the pictures -- this was one of the down sides. Same goes for the other things I called out); this lead to some tears for everyone involved. There was a speaker who talked about honoring the people who made us feminists and fighters, and of course people spoke out about their mothers, and of course that hurt, because I miss mine so much. She was super conservative, and she had only just begun coming around toward queer rights before she died, but she loved me, and my siblings, and she taught me, always, to fight and to protect the people who can't. There were so many kids there, and they were delightful; my favorite was this girl, probably around 10, dressed as Rey from Star Wars. She marched with an adult, and the two of them carried trans signs (including trans women = women, which was great), and she was super excited about my sign. Oh, dear child, you give me hope. There were some great speakers, including Kaijuanda Sutton who talked about domestic violence and body choice; Bethany Johnson, a trans woman activist who was wearing a Captain America shield on her back and talked about what has been done locally to damage LGBTQIA rights even before this election; and Cori Bush, an amazing black woman politician and Ferguson activist, who spoke about what we need to do next, but also how white women need to examine where they were and why they hadn't shown up for the black people, the black kids, who have been gunned down, for the native lives lost, for all the work people of color have been doing -- and she was the only one I heard talk about disability activism. She was the best, and if she runs again next cycle, I'm going to volunteer for her campaign.
Tons of people asked to take pictures of me with my sign, and I actually stopped a few people who were driving around us from shouting things out their windows; I could see them gearing up, but the second they found me staring at them, they shut up and took off. (Yet another reason I wanted to face the street. We were in the town square, which has a circle drive around it, and some of these people kept circling; Sister K said one of the last protests she attended down there, white men in giant pickup trucks with confederate flags kept circling like the predators they are.)
Negatives included: still not enough intersectionality, the fact that we had to fight to have black women speak, and the lack of disability being addressed (or of access being a part of the planning, or at least not publicly at all).
I'm also seeing a lot of people (white women in particular) talking about how peaceful this protest was (which, I don't think officially most of them identified as a protest, it was a rally and a march), how people should learn from this peaceful protest, and how there wasn't really any police violence.
My response: COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT. For so many reasons, including: protests don't have to be peaceful; the people you are demanding learn from you have been protesting more and harder and better than most of you have ever done; women of color in particular do so much fucking work you should be learning from them and their work (and paying them for it); and the reason there has been so much less police violence is because the majority participants of most of these marches ARE FUCKING WHITE.
All of this is coming from liberals who damn well should know better, so I'm already raging yet again. (In talking with Sister K earlier, I realized why, even though blue is my favorite color, and most of my wardrobe used to be blue, now I wear a ton of red. It's because blue is soothing, and red is still the color of anger for me, and I am always angry. [Why yes, I am also basically Bruce Banner and the Hulk, why do you ask? (Seriously, though, Jennifer Walters is my favorite Hulk.)])
We have so much work to do.
(Another good thing was all the puppies. TOO TOO CUTE.)
Sister K knitted us pussy hats (mine is a gorgeous, heavy blue yarn, and so freaking warm -- even though the weather was really too nice today to make it comfortable to wear), her husband marched with us, and the two of them carried gorgeous signs. (One of the national signs, and one a graphic design friend of hers designed). I made my own two-sided sign, very simple, and had it printed, because I don't do sign lettering very well. One side said, "Wolves and girls, both have sharp teeth," which is from Marjorie Lui's Black Widow: The Name of the Rose, in black lettering with two black wolf silhouettes. The other side said the following, with certain sections colored with markers (a rainbow around lgbtqia and silver and bronze on the top and bottom lines):
Equality for All
Black Lives Matter
LGBTQIA Rights
No Human is Illegal
Native Rights
Religious Freedom
Disability Rights
Healthcare = Human Right
Protect the Vulnerable
Together We Rise
I wanted to put so many more things on there, but I also wanted them to be easy to read from a distance, and I ran out of room. (I've never had a poster printed before, and this was the largest the print shop would do without going into specialty printing. I glued the printed papers onto neon rainbow poster board, and it all worked pretty great. (Particularly because during the rally, I faced the road because I couldn't handle having my back to that space, and turned the quality side out for people driving past, so I got to look at the wolf side, which is one of my inspirations each morning.
The event was okay. It had really great moments; I love marching alongside other people fighting for equal rights, particularly Sister K and Brother N. I had so many older queer couples, particularly gay men, come up to me to thank me for including them on the sign, and to whisper to me that we were family (I was one of the few people who specifically called out certain rights, at least from what I saw at the rally and what I've seen in the pictures -- this was one of the down sides. Same goes for the other things I called out); this lead to some tears for everyone involved. There was a speaker who talked about honoring the people who made us feminists and fighters, and of course people spoke out about their mothers, and of course that hurt, because I miss mine so much. She was super conservative, and she had only just begun coming around toward queer rights before she died, but she loved me, and my siblings, and she taught me, always, to fight and to protect the people who can't. There were so many kids there, and they were delightful; my favorite was this girl, probably around 10, dressed as Rey from Star Wars. She marched with an adult, and the two of them carried trans signs (including trans women = women, which was great), and she was super excited about my sign. Oh, dear child, you give me hope. There were some great speakers, including Kaijuanda Sutton who talked about domestic violence and body choice; Bethany Johnson, a trans woman activist who was wearing a Captain America shield on her back and talked about what has been done locally to damage LGBTQIA rights even before this election; and Cori Bush, an amazing black woman politician and Ferguson activist, who spoke about what we need to do next, but also how white women need to examine where they were and why they hadn't shown up for the black people, the black kids, who have been gunned down, for the native lives lost, for all the work people of color have been doing -- and she was the only one I heard talk about disability activism. She was the best, and if she runs again next cycle, I'm going to volunteer for her campaign.
Tons of people asked to take pictures of me with my sign, and I actually stopped a few people who were driving around us from shouting things out their windows; I could see them gearing up, but the second they found me staring at them, they shut up and took off. (Yet another reason I wanted to face the street. We were in the town square, which has a circle drive around it, and some of these people kept circling; Sister K said one of the last protests she attended down there, white men in giant pickup trucks with confederate flags kept circling like the predators they are.)
Negatives included: still not enough intersectionality, the fact that we had to fight to have black women speak, and the lack of disability being addressed (or of access being a part of the planning, or at least not publicly at all).
I'm also seeing a lot of people (white women in particular) talking about how peaceful this protest was (which, I don't think officially most of them identified as a protest, it was a rally and a march), how people should learn from this peaceful protest, and how there wasn't really any police violence.
My response: COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT. For so many reasons, including: protests don't have to be peaceful; the people you are demanding learn from you have been protesting more and harder and better than most of you have ever done; women of color in particular do so much fucking work you should be learning from them and their work (and paying them for it); and the reason there has been so much less police violence is because the majority participants of most of these marches ARE FUCKING WHITE.
All of this is coming from liberals who damn well should know better, so I'm already raging yet again. (In talking with Sister K earlier, I realized why, even though blue is my favorite color, and most of my wardrobe used to be blue, now I wear a ton of red. It's because blue is soothing, and red is still the color of anger for me, and I am always angry. [Why yes, I am also basically Bruce Banner and the Hulk, why do you ask? (Seriously, though, Jennifer Walters is my favorite Hulk.)])
We have so much work to do.
(Another good thing was all the puppies. TOO TOO CUTE.)
