Pussyhat

Dear Women of the United States, thank you for today. Thank you for getting up, for standing up, for shouting up. For demanding visibility and acknowledgment. I was so, so proud to be a woman in America today, and these past few months it hasn't felt very good.

Thank you for recognizing that women are not the only group with a hell of a lot to lose here. For raising your voices for all of those who would be silenced: minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ, the disabled. For demanding better for all of us.

Dear Women of the World, thank you for standing with us. Thank you for acknowledging our anguish, our bewilderment, our profound frustration, and raising your voices and your feet to remind us that we are seen. That we are not alone.

Dear Men of the United States who joined in protest today, thank you. Thank you for standing with us. For your unflinching, unblinking, unhesitating witness to the primal scream that rose across America and the world today.

The time for slow and steady progress is over. The time for incremental steps toward equality is over. The time for "good enough" is over.

On November 8th, the eve of what I believed would be the election of the first woman president, I wrote of the hope I had for my daughter and her future.

"We have come so far, my darling daughter. We have so far to go. But we will never get there if we don't select leaders who have lived our experience." 

On November 9th, those dreams came crashing down.

On November 10th, I posted on Facebook the following:

"Yesterday morning, I looked at my daughter and thought: 'sweet girl, today we are going to elect a woman to the nation's highest office. We're going to make history so that when you vote for a woman, it will be a perfectly common, normal thing.'

This morning, I looked at my daughter and thought: 'sweet girl, I'm so sorry. Your America will not be better than mine after all.'"

And then a few days later, this:

This is the future we will leave for our children. At the very least, we owe it to them to raise our voices, to be heard, to go down fighting. Let it not be said of my generation that we went quietly into the night.

On January 21, I looked at the people of my city and the pictures flooding in from around the globe. City after city reporting record numbers and crowded streets and chants that rung out in the canyons of skyscrapers.

We are not going quietly. We are not receding politely. We are fighters.  If you're going to strip me of my rights, you're going to have to look me in the eye as you do it. And you're going to have to look in the eyes of all the women who stand behind me. Millions and millions of women. Come at me. I promise, I can take you.

I'm going to leave it to Hillary Rodham Clinton to close this one out, because she said it best. And because while she may not be President of the United States of America today, she ignited the passion of generations. She changed the world for the better.

“To all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.” -- HRC

 I'm still with her. I'm with all of you.