Women's March and Love

Last January I participated in the Women's March on Washington with my two sisters, older brother, and Great Aunt. It was a very last minute decision but an experience I felt as though I could not pass up. My Great Aunt Linda has always been a strong woman example in my life. Her husband my Great Uncle Bob passed away more than fifteen years ago but if that was about to stop her from living her life we were all wrong. The feelings and emotion I got from seeing my very old Aunt Linda walk as fast as she could towards me the morning of the March is a memory I will not forget.
I thought the March would have many mixed emotions but to my disbelief, there was only one feeling that I could from this immense crowd. It was love, there was no hate it was only loved that I felt as people cheered and came together in the light of sadness. Although this was not a service event this was definitely a city experience that was emotionally powerful that made me question and wonder.

I had been to D.C. a handful of times, it is truly a beautiful city you cannot turn your head and not see a moment in history looking back at you. In a city, there are many different classes of people but on this day I felt as though there was only one. In Peter-Hans Kolvenbach’s article, The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education, the section titled B. The promotion of justice had a part that I felt connected to the emotions and feelings I experienced on the day of the March. In the second paragraph, Kolvenbach talks about Saint Ignatius and his desire to spread love not only in words but in actions “the Congregational committed the Society to the promotion of justice as a concrete radical but proportionate response to an unjustly suffering world” (27). The Woman March on Washington was a response to what had happened the day before the people who were there suffering.

Frances E. W. Harper’s, poem Learning to Read I interpreted as a desire to do what you are not allowed to do “But oh! How the Rebs did hate it, - It was agin’ their rule”. Reading the poem I at first thought the girl narrating the poem was young but she is sixty years old still with a desire to learn and expand her knowledge. This woman made me think of my Aunt Linda who lives her life with a thirst for knowledge. Just the other day I got an email from her asking about the start of my school year and how my classes were going. She has always had a love for learning and she is still taking college classes, she is wondering if we were taking any of the same ones!

The last two poems at first did not connect but after thinking about them in relation to the Women's March on Washington. They started to mesh together more and more. Mending Wall by Robert Frost, I thought connected to Jill McDonough’s Accident, Mass. Ave. they both were about two people or two sides of an opinion just like the March on Washington. Frost describes a  disagreement with people over the trees and the growth of them. At the end of the poem “Good fences make good neighbors” this ending of the poem may leave you questioning but I think they are saying that the separation between two people is better than the fight. McDonough’s poem was the immediate reaction of two people in a stressful situation. This reminded me of the people who were protesting the March, there were not many but I did see some. McDonough writes “I hugged her, and I said We were scared, weren’t we? And she nodded and we laughed.” People are scared, scared of the change in the world that happened following the election but love and laughter can heal what screaming and fighting cannot.