This past weekend, I went to the Women’s March on Washington.

I’ve never been particularly reticent about my political beliefs, but this is the first big protest I’ve ever attended. I set up one of the four buses leaving from Madison – though I think we could have easily filled more, especially as the site was extremely optimistic about timing and people wouldn’t have realized they were signing up for 18 hours on a bus each way (my whole body hurts).

When we got there, we were in the RFK Stadium parking lot with what was estimated to be 1800 other buses. The walk to the starting point took a while, and was mostly through suburb, where a lot of houses had signs out front, like the one at left or MLK quotes.

It took me a while to get to the actual march: there was a Starbucks on the way and I needed coffee, and then stayed a while talking to other women who were there for the March. I think at that point I was still a mile from the start point, but at least 90% of the people I saw were there for the March.

A number of people I know showed up for either the March or various sister marches, but I knew a far larger number who didn’t or couldn’t go for reasons of young children or or work or disability or money (did u kno: if you start a Skedaddle route, you get a free ticket). Because I knew a lot of people who couldn’t go, it felt even more important for me to be there; I was going on their behalf. I was going because my four year old cousin deserves a better world than this when she grows up, amongst many other reasons.

You can find all kinds of official coverage of the March – I actually had my tweets included in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel coverage. I also posted a Facebook album of the pictures and video I took and a write-up of my hilariously brief encounter with ‘counter-protesters.’ Because of the plethora of coverage and the fact that I still feel kind of like I rode home under the bus rather than on it, I’m going to keep this short:

The streets ran pink, and loud. It was the biggest post-inauguration protest in history, and no amount of official lies can erase that. The March was very white, but there were women of many backgrounds there, including hijabi sisters with American flags as scarves, because this is their country as much as mine. There were no arrests.

Even better, on the way back, the women on my bus were talking about what’s next: what we’ll do so this really was just a beginning, so that we can reach out and help and make a difference through the next four years.