Any responsible estimate of total participation starts at 2 Million. Just off the top of my head there were at least 6 cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, D.C., New York, and Las Vegas where participation was 200,000 or more.
That’s 1.2 Million right there. Some reports add 400,000 between Los Angeles and Chicago alone. That’s 1.6 Million. Over 250 demonstrations in all 50 States.
Yet it was virtually ignored by the Corporate Media and these sorry segments (well, except for Seth Meyers, he did a pretty good job) are the best our Late Night News came up with.
Worse, after saving their asses in Virginia and Alabama, the Democratic Party ignored all this energy and stabbed these people in the back by caving on #TrumpShutdown to the Racist Republicans who think any countries whose people are Black or Brown are “shithole countries”.
They are women’s marches. We know last year single biggest one-day demonstration in this country’s history, we heard how afterwards, it was okay but just a march, it’s performance, fun, people get together and wear their cute hats, whatever. No one seems to have connected, still, a year later when there is a spontaneous demonstration almost the same size in some places like Chicago, bigger, without a centralized organization drawing everybody.
I didn’t know about the marches. I write about women and politics. I didn’t know there would be women’s marches until January and they were massive. They don’t just have cute marches with the hats with the fact it’s women clogging congressional phone lines and doing town halls, who have been organizing on the grassroots activist level around state and local office races around the country who have been winning in New Jersey, in Virginia and who are running in unprecedented numbers for the House, for the Senate and primarying Democrats from the left.
And apparently, the media’s failure to take this seriously as a political movement and not as some social weekend thing that women do once a year, has led Senate Democrats to think it’s not a serious political movement.
The classical Greek definition of Irony, Tragic Irony, is an ultimately fatal flaw the Protagonist possesses that the Audience knows about but the Character fails to recognize before their inevitable Doom.