A Historic Moment -- the Women's March

After the trauma of the election, I shut off from politics as much as possible. Mostly, I just couldn't afford the energy, not with my own precarious graduate student situation. I had a dissertation to finish and, even when I completed the first draft, there's the terrifying knowledge that my job prospects are statistically abysmal, that we're a single-income family whose income ends in April, and we're still not sure about *M immigration status, mostly due to bureaucratic incompetency. Not to mention all the c.v. building things I must do in the meantime. Plus, being ABD, I tend to be cut off from all human contact, so word of mouth filters down to me slowly. Even had I heard, though, my lack of car has, over the years, given me the tendency to block out events beyond a five-mile radius of my home.

So while a part of me realized that the Women's March yesterday would be big, I didn't quite realize how big it was.

All over the news and social media, I kept seeing images from the protesters and activists on-scene, not only in Washington D.C. but in satellite areas. It gave me an immense pride and respect to see all those people protesting what's currently happening, and I realized that not going at least to one of the satellite marches will be a big regret of mine.

And the administration reacted as we've come to expect -- ignoring the march, posting a bizarre press conference where the press secretary had an apoplectic fit about news organizations accurately reporting the size of Trump's inauguration crowd, Trump's himself ranting about crowd size while addressing the CIA before their Memorial Wall of Agency heroes, which is about as clueless and insulting a thing as I can imagine.

I really wish I could be more active in all this.