Thursday, April 24, 2025
What were you doing on April 6, 1992?
I was marching in Washington, with more than 500,000 other people in support of women’s reproductive rights. George H.W. Bush was in the White House. In an act that felt wildly transgressive, many of us came armed with tennis balls, and we threw them over the gate onto the White House lawn. Ah, such innocent times.
My mother, my daughter and I took the train to D.C., and made our way down Pennsylvania Avenue with Americans from every part of the country, from every cultural, ethnic, religious, geographic and intellectual dot on the spectrum of humanity. I had never been surrounded by so many human beings, pressed in close around one another, chanting and carrying signs. We had common cause, and had left our daily lives to do what Democracy demands of all of us: To speak truth to power. To call out injustice. To secure every woman’s right to make decisions about her body, without interference from any governmental entity.
The New York Times wrote that day in 1992: “At least half a million people marched from the White House to the Mall near the Capitol today in support of abortion rights, hoping to impress lawmakers and the public with their political influence as the Supreme Court considers a Pennsylvania case that could sharply limit women’s access to abortions . . .
“. . . The marchers came by plane and bus and train and car. They included mothers and daughters, Hollywood stars, teachers, preachers and doctors, Republicans for Choice, Catholics for Choice and two presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Edmund G. Brown Jr. . . .
“. . . The march came at a time of heightened urgency for the abortion-rights movement, when there is a sense that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing a nationwide right to abortion, is in mortal danger.”
Mortal danger, indeed. With a sharp turn to the right in 2022, the court overturned Roe v. Wade. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a political think tank dedicated to supporting reproductive and gender freedoms, the government will soon come after our other rights to live and love as we choose.
So our marching in ’92 didn’t secure women’s rights forever, but it empowered us to speak out, and it gave us a blueprint for peaceful protest.
Roe has fallen, but we have not. The muscle and mind memories of rising up stay with us, and now is the time to deploy ourselves again, for all the other freedoms threatened by an increasingly autocratic president and his acolytes. In recent weeks, a terrible cascade of restrictive executive orders and wholesale firings of government workers has shaken all of us, Democrats and Republicans, federal workers and everyone who depends on their good work.
The unelected, deeply embedded Elon Musk, who never earned a vote or won an election, has ruined the lives of thousands of people whom he deems slackers. He is, in some ways, a monstrous animated effigy, brought to life to issue edicts and trample freedoms as he flouts laws and boundaries that support our democracy. He is an insensitive billionaire with the keys to the kingdom, except it isn’t a kingdom, and historically, we overturn our kings.
Musk is the muscle, pushing out workers and warning that this will cause “pain.” But not for him. Not for the other gazillionaires. Not for the GOP elite who have not yet realized the pain is coming for them, too.
Surely there is enough evidence, just in these first weeks of the new administration, that we need to forget our affiliations, erase our labels and come together to preserve our rights to privacy and agency. When you cast your vote last November, did you really want Musk & Co. rustling through your tax returns and health records?
What were you doing on March 1, two weeks ago? I was home reading and relaxing, but my grandson, a high school kid, led a pro-Democracy rally on the other side of the country, in the small town where he lives. Hundreds of people turned out in a peaceful demonstration for American freedom, which is increasingly under threat from the current administration. They chanted, “This is what Democracy looks like!” as they honked their horns and marched and began to feel better than they had in weeks, just being out there, just saying, “This will not stand.”
Copyright 2025 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.
