We see what happens when women lead.
Unlike on Inauguration Day on Friday, when a pocket of protesters hurled bricks, set fires and threw rocks at police on the streets of Washington, leading to the arrest of 200 people, there were no arrests during Saturday's Women's March on Washington. There have been no reports of violence at any of the hundreds of sister marches, which saw roughly 3.3 million protesters in 500 cities on every continent, including Antarctica.
There was no one strapping issue or person dominating the march. A diversity of things women care about instead was apparent, represented in signs held aloft on gift-wrap tubes, in felt lettering, in artists' cut-out renderings of Eleanor Roosevelt's face and Maya Angelou's, held high above the crowd. Women came in suffragist costumes, as Wonder Woman, as a trio of Statues of Liberties. Mostly they came in pink hats.
And when the weak, the infirm or the lost needed help, there was a fast and easy parting of the pink-capped seas, unheard of at Stones concerts or a Mardi Gras parade. "Wheelchair coming through!" marchers shouted one to the other as shoulder-to-shoulder crowds somehow made way. When I couldn't find my daughter, a young woman took to her megaphone, and soon the crowd began to chant "Emily Hook! Emily Hook!"
It was a weekend of feminine energy, a moment in time for personal and collective history books, intersectional feminism emerged from the trenches for those of us who cut our working-mother teeth reading Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, and for our idealistic sons and daughters, the "Yes, we can!" generation who came of political age with President Obama.
Arms linked, signs held high, when the march finally started along the people-filled route after the rallying cries of Angela Davis, Steinem and a dozen others, we chanted. "Tell me what democracy looks like? This is what democracy looks like." And we sang "This land is your land. This land is our land," the complex tears flowing down our cheeks.
Men were with us. But there was neither domination, nor estranged acquiescence as brothers, husbands and fathers simply melded their voices and their signs "I'm with her" and "He for she," with ours, in a singular moment when women held court and power all over the world, on a planet where men outnumber women in national government leadership 4-to-1.
My son, who later told me he went on the march to "show solidarity with the women in his life," stood respectfully quiet when a middle-aged female Trump supporter approached me near the end of the march and told me she liked my signs: "No one is free when some are oppressed" and "Make America love again." Despite being a gender-equality activist with much of his own to say, Chris stood back, giving space for us two women to speak and listen to each other.
Our civil search for common ground was aborted only when a male Trump supporter joined the woman and tried to incite an argument about the Confederate flag, at which point I said to my son, "Let's go."
Perhaps it is extraneous to note the inciter was a man. Perhaps not, as this encounter with male bombast was the only tarnish on an otherwise untarnished weekend that began with the Peace Ball at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Here is where my son and his girlfriend and I gathered with 3,000 others at an "alternative inaugural ball," where we heard activist Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund, say: "Real peace must be peace and justice" and the voice of Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey: "They say there is a storm coming. We are the storm."
To say this was a weekend of full-on hope is to be disingenuous. At the very moment my adult children and their friends and I were attending peaceful protests at Union Station on Friday, Donald Trump was a few blocks away, putting his hand on the Bible.
Indeed, one of the lasting messages of the weekend was not one of hope. African-American activist and former MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry spoke to a standing-room only All Souls Unitarian-Universalist Church about the long arm of suffering, known all too well by her kin.
"You don't always get to live in the part (of history) that is victorious," she said, adding we might not see victory in 2018 or 2020 either. "This is it. This is humanity."
And so it seems that we might have to be in it for the long haul, as Facebook bursts the morning after and the morning after that with calls for resistance, with diatribes about arguments and arguments about diatribes, many of them stemming from something so silly as counting the people at the march and pray tell me, what is an "alternative fact?"
My children and their friends, who came from three states to march, who carried "Earth doesn't have 4 years" signs, were so inspired as to start a group called Rise Up, in which they will use "10 actions for the first 100 Days" sponsored by the Women's March to lead them to action.
"It's so incredible that our focus got to be where it needed to be during the inauguration, that the march became the story of the hour and that the whole world was not only watching, but participating," said my son. "It's awesome now to have the spirit of the march and the momentum to carry us forward."
We see what happens when women lead.
