My Mother Taught Me the Golden Rule
The Women’s March on Cities was the kind of tidal event that shakes history, making waves that will still be felt long after we are here to witness them. In the immediate moment on Saturday, one small ripple reached me with a simple reminder: Call your mother.
This is rarely bad advice, but for me, the motive was specific. My mom’s from the age of network TV and daily newspapers, and I wanted to be sure she saw the magnitude of what was happening around her. Turns out, she already knew more than I did.
Watertown is a city of about 28,000 in the northern reaches of New York State. Located 30 miles south of the Ontario border near Fort Drum, the base of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, Watertown was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries home to astounding wealth and thriving industry. That past far behind, its economy now relies largely on the dollars of stationed GIs and visiting Canadians to maintain a service sector of big boxes and small diners. Watertown is the seat of Jefferson County, where Trump defeated Clinton by a 20 point margin in November. It is the place where I was born and raised, where my mother has lived almost all of her life.
My mom’s no partisan — she described her trip to vote for Clinton in November as an uncomfortable necessity, “like going to the dentist.” But she felt far more moved this Saturday, setting out on a cold uphill walk to All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church where a Sister Rally was expecting maybe several dozen to attend.
Like most of the day’s events, the organizers underestimated. Many others walked as well, or drove from their neighborhoods and far-flung townships. Collectively, they packed the room full with nearly 300 people of all ages and backgrounds — 300 people joining to rally against Trumpism in a deeply conservative Army town where he won most votes. In the town where I grew up, and cannot recall 300 people ever rallying to resist anything at all.
Meanwhile, here in my adopted home of Austin, perhaps 50,000 people — two Watertowns at once — formed a continuous belt of humanity from the Texas Capitol down Congress Avenue to Sixth Street, around the corner, and back.
On November 9, the Internet’s right wing seized on a false notion that protests here in Austin were fomented by outsiders who had been bused in. That paid-activists-in-buses conspiracy theory wasn’t left a single place to hide this weekend. Certainly, there was no shortage of buses in Washington, DC — 1,000 more parking permits were requested for Saturday than for Friday’s inauguration. But the indisputable proof was the hundreds of thousands of people on their feet all at once in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Jackson, St. Louis, Lansing, Baltimore, Memphis, Nashville, New York, Boston, Albany, Austin, Watertown, and every other point of origin in the United States. Everyone damn sure didn’t bus down from Canada, where Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Vancouver stood in solidarity with Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Paris, London, Nairobi, Cape Town, Moscow, Yangon, Tokyo, Sydney, and Antarctica.
Being in the streets surrounded by women, children, men, all kinds of people, means stepping outside the toxic bubble where lies can get away with themselves, where you can be fooled into pretending the others don’t exist, or that they’re not who you think they are, that they’re not on your side, that they came from somewhere else and they’ll be leaving soon. The most basic human connection of sharing physical space with other human beings is reestablished. This primordial truth that brings children from mothers, the inescapable reality of human connection, is at the core of the resistance mobilized by the Women’s March.
So to offer one of many possible answers to the snide question of what the Women’s March accomplished, how about the sight of a million mothers soaping the very first bald-faced lie straight out of that autocratic Press Secretary’s mouth? Not by arguing over the truth, parsing the details and debating the angles, but by holding the self-evident up strong and high, far above of the grabby reach of little red hands.
Mothers tend to teach us that lying is a fool’s chore, because eventually the worst of the truth will come out. So it comes as no surprise that during the same hours historical whoppers were being fabricated, the administration was also busy causing real carnage: Working class homeowners and homebuyers got their pockets picked. Climate change, civil and LGBTQ rights, health care, and more were all ripped out of the White House website. The Department of Justice played hooky on hearings over the unconstitutional Texas voter ID law and the violently unjust Baltimore Police Department. And, of course, one of those indecent little red hands grabbed its pen in front of everybody to pleasure itself with some fuzzy thrusts at the Affordable Care Act. It’s tempting to wonder what Trump’s own mother, who spoke English as a second language, arrived in the US at the age of 18, worked for years as a domestic servant, and made donations to disabled persons organizations would have to say about his infant presidency’s rampage.
As for my mom, she taught me to do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. I was at work during the Women’s March, but nonetheless surrounded by all kinds of people all day long. I spoke with natives of at least three different continents, and am quite sure that human qualities don’t terminate at borders. I saw a Syrian family, a woman and a man and a wide-eyed boy, who were in every way the very opposite of a threat. I shook hands with a man whose life has been a constant struggle through drug addiction, mental and physical illness, poverty, every grinding wheel of the system that chews up black bodies, who yet still doesn’t quit struggling. I stood by a blonde woman sharing her photographs of Cairo with an Egyptian man who used to guide Italian tourists through the same streets she’d visited. These are the people of the city I live in, the country I live in, the planet I live on. These are the people whose hearts pump blood just like mine, whose lives are breathed in from the very same air. Oxygen doesn’t carry a passport.
My mom didn’t raise me to be a liar, a cheat, a bully, or a bigot. In sharing with me the diverse voices she heard raised in that Watertown church, the depth of what’s at stake right now became even more clear. This administration is every bit as hazardous to the small communities that elected it as to the cities that reject it. The divide everyone keeps talking about is a fault line far below politics. It is a tectonic friction in our most basic understanding of what is to be learned from the Golden Rule. At the roots of racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, xeniophobia, Islamophobia and Antisemitism, hoplophilia, and every other manifestation of power-plus-loathing, the Golden Rule is a grotesque math for building walls between us to never be crossed, for measuring lines in the sand and arming against the inevitable paranoia. The Women’s March, the anti-Trump resistance, all that has preceded it and all that will follow, are birthed from a much different, more challenging, morally opposed understanding of the Golden Rule’s equation: We will carry each other, we will do our best to love one another even when we don’t know how or if we even can, our fates cannot be separated any more than a child’s from a mother’s.
