Today I leave for Washington where my daughter and I and many other mothers and daughters will fly to Washington DC to march. We booked our rooms and bought our tickets in a flurry by the end of election weekend.
I have heard a variety of answers women give for why we’re marching, sometimes not always having an exact “clean” answer to the delight of conservative talk show hosts. It mostly makes me cringe. The reason has evolved into the phrase “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”. Many will wear “pussy hats” in reaction to the objectification and self admitted assault of various women’s bodies we heard. But that’s not why I’m marching or bought my ticket that day. Those are just lightening bolts of outrage stemming from a bigger storm.
On November 8th, we stood at the precipice of a moment in history where for the first time the most powerful person in the world was going to be a woman. This wasn’t just significant for American history, this was going to be a significant moment in history of the world. That moment imploded while we watched on TV, not unlike watching The Challenger Space Shuttle exploding in midair. The tinder of that fire was fake polls, fake news, and propaganda. That moment was taken because of gross distortions propagated by the FBI, the Russians or others designed to undermine and bring this woman, who won the popular vote, down. A woman, Hillary Clinton, who I still believe would have been an incredible leader.
But that moment was just a symptom and not the exact reason I’m marching. The mobilizing of hundreds of thousands of women like me, in an instant on November 9th, was an instantaneous reaction — a recoiling of our sensibilities so deep that at the time we couldn’t initially articulate it, we were too busy getting plane tickets and looking for places to stay. Why am I marching? I’m marching for Truth.
I agree that Trump has “tapped into something”. I also believes he riles it up. In his minutes ago inaugural address he refers to ending the carnage, gangs, rusted factories and ended pumping a fist in the air. The assault on Truth has washed over our media outlets like an acidic wave and erodes everything we what we stand for. Instead of focusing on Donald Trump’s fraught conflicts of interest, all we talked about for a week was golden showers. Whether brilliantly strategic or subconsciously genius at distracting from the Truth, he or his people have a way of making us focus on the wrong thing while the coin slides under the other cup. There are so many things to be outraged about that we can’t even fit it on a poster board. The added benefit for Trump is that the accumulation of these hair-on-fire moments rife with pussy and prostitutes only serve to inoculate him from the the bigger virus.
This is bigger than Clinton or Trump. We have to get out of our echo chambers and reality distortion fields, and find out what is really going on and act on it. We have to get local and be real. In a recent Medium article by Sean Blanda, he expertly filets about how media companies are incentivized to not discover the truth.
I am not marching for women’s rights, I’m marching for Truth. The Truth is what’s at stake. I want to see it better. And when millions of women around the country instinctively and passionately mobilize this way to call bullshit on something, Lies should be afraid, very afraid.
Originally published at medium.com