I went to the Phoenix Women’s March yesterday. I wanted to talk to the attendees and find out why they went. Also, I went because I wanted to be in solidarity over the fact that the election was stolen from us by people such as Vladimir Putin.

Granted: that one probably will make a few people angry, but whatever.

On Friday, the day of the inauguration, Phoenix was shrouded in clouds and fog with a weeping sky. I honestly thought it was God weeping for what we have wrought. I thought that even more strongly yesterday, since the day dawned bright, clear, and with just enough breeze to make it slightly chilly. When my sister and I got to the event, it was already pretty crowded. The official start was 10:00 am, but loads of people had gathered by 9:40.

We wandered around a bit and then I climbed on something to take some video.

You can hear a man at the beginning yelling, “Mary!” Fear not, according to my sources, he found her.

A Big Event

The crowd was pretty big. Arizona doesn’t do much in the way of protests. Most of ours are pretty small — maybe a few hundred people. Relatively speaking, this one was huge: over 36,000 people.

And as always, there are signs at these things. Most of them were hand drawn:

Why March?

I had a chance to talk to a couple of the women there.

The first, Sloan, was at the march to resist and to show her support for the women like herself. She said, “I have spent 20 years in a career that is totally dominated by men, and I’ve been paid less than all my male counterparts. I was not invited to the Christmas party because it was held at Hooters.”

She also saw her attendance in generational terms — paying back to the women who went before and helping those coming after.

The second woman I spoke with was ZZ. She said she was there because she couldn’t believe that the fact that Trump admitted to committing sexual assault wasn’t enough to finish him as a candidate.

That is hard to understand. He should have been trash the minute that recording came out. But he wasn’t because, well, it seems that sexual assault doesn’t bother people in reality as much as it does in the abstract.

The Phoenix Women’s March: One Part of a Much Larger Whole

The Phoenix Women’s March was one of 600 that were happening worldwide — all of them reporting massive turnout, far exceeding what the organizers planned.

A friend, Jason Karsh, posted a large collection of pictures from the Las Vegas Women’s March. That’s worth checking out. But there were marches everywhere — even in Antarctica.