If it "didn’t accomplish anything" last time, why do I keep marching?

It was a chilly Saturday: a high of 36 degrees in the occasional sunlight that poked through a scrim of clouds. We parked on Kelly Drive and walked toward Broad and Arch, the Arch Street United Methodist Church, where a crowd gathered, some folks holding a red-and-white banner reading, “Sanctuary: It’s a Philly Thing.”

There were rabbis, including the leader of my own synagogue, the Reconstructionist, Roxborough-based Mishkan Shalom, and pastors and imams and some Sisters of Saint Joseph, huddled together for solidarity and maybe warmth, who’d come by bus to join the protest. Plenty of non-clergy, too: a multi-ethnic, multi-generational crowd winding slowly and sonorously from the church toward LOVE Park.

Hundreds against one bad week

Organizers had hoped for 50 people. But there were hundreds. It had been a bad week, with executive orders hissing forth since Inauguration Moment, a slew of toxic declarations followed by Trump tossing his black Sharpie signing pens to disciples in a performative smirk of power and glee.

At the park, we sang, we chanted, we formed a ring around the LOVE sculpture. At one point, organizers tried to toss black cloth over the statue as a photogenic symbol of how Trump’s hateful rhetoric and actions were occluding the love embedded in our city’s name (philos, from the ancient Greek, meaning beloved, dear, or loving).

But the January wind made that gesture hard to execute; the cloth kept billowing away from the statue or rippling back on itself, an unintentional but apt metaphor: See? LOVE is irrepressible. It can’t be covered up.

“It didn’t accomplish anything”

Later, I told some friends about the day: How I sang along with the crowd, “We’re gonna keep on moving forward,” alternating English verses with the Spanish, “Seguimos adelante/siempre adelante,” matching pace and pitch with Mishkan’s former rabbi, Linda Holtzman.

I described how it felt when the internal bulwark ruptured and my tears spilled through—weeks (no, months; nah, how about years?) of accumulated grief and rage, ever since King Donald swanned down that escalator in 2015 and declared his bid for president—and how I had to stop singing until I could find breath again.

I said the rally reminded me that I’m not alone in my outrage, terror, and despair.

“Oh, so you went because it made you feel good,” one friend said. She’s stopped going to marches. “It didn’t accomplish anything the last time,” she noted cynically.

My impulse was to defend myself: No, that’s not why I went. Feeling “good” seemed a weak, self-serving reason for political action. But my friend’s comment made me wonder: Why am I still marching?

I march…

…because I fear for my colleagues whose parents are undocumented and who are having, right this minute, fraught conversations about whether they should leave the country now or wait until ICE boots them from our borders.

Because I walk around in a 24/7 churn of agitation about the undoing of democracy, the sundering of foreign aid, the vicious and rapid takeover of government by an unelected billionaire, the future of this fragile, quaking planet.

I march to add one more body to the crowd-count.

Because, after marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “I felt my legs were praying,” and because that historical moment is captured in a large-format, black-and-white photograph hanging in a gathering space of my synagogue, where I see it every time I reach for a cup of seltzer after a Shabbat service.

And because Heschel may have been paraphrasing Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist who escaped enslavement at age 20 and said, “Praying for freedom never did me any good until I started praying with my feet.”

I march to remember that policies affect people, and that people make policies.

I march to show up for folks who risk their lives (their jobs, their homes) by standing up in public with a sign.

I march because, more than 30 years ago, I heard a talk by Maya Angelou in which she challenged us to live a life for which we could respond with honor to the ancestors when they ask, “Now, what have you done in my name?”

Because it took nearly a century of lobbying, speechmaking, letter-writing, strategizing, hunger-striking and yes, marching, to pass the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote.

Because it took longer than that to end chattel slavery.

Because we don’t know how long justice will take, this time.

Because my tradition insists that we are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.

Because there will be a time when I can’t venture downtown on a freezing Saturday—when my body will be too frail, exhausted, or vulnerable to join the crowd shouting and singing and shuffling forward, step by incremental, hard-won step.

Because this year, I can.

And yes, because it did feel good to sing through my tears, weep through my song, and dance in place a little bit to keep warm while wind kept tugging at that black fabric, which kept refusing to cling, so that even when organizers managed to hoist the cloth high overhead, a little bit of LOVE peeked out.