Why I went to the Women's March in San Jose' yesterday?

I went to the Women's March yesterday in San Jose, and it was a most edifying and encouraging experience.

Police estimated the crowd at 25,000!  Surely, it marks a most historic statistic in the annals of marching in San Jose!  And, most definitely the nation!

The San Jose Mercury News gave Mayor Sam Liccardo's view of the Women's March: "In San Jose, Mayor Sam Liccardo tweeted an overhead photo of “a beautiful crowd” around City Hall, and added a hashtag that said, “This is what democracy looks like.”"  http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/20/bay-area-womens-marches-where-when-and-why/

CBS reported: "Assemblyman Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, was one of the speakers at the event and said it is the largest demonstration in San Jose’s history."  http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/01/21/san-jose-womens-march-protest/

So, why did I go to the Women's March in San Jose'?

I went to the women's March in San Jose' to:

• support my sisters and brothers around the world, our nation's most vulnerable groups, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, "Minorities", gay,  impoverished, persons with disability, the multitude of incarcerated and people hungering for truth and justice
• support truth; Trump received less than 2.8 million votes
• demand an investigation into Trump's connections to Russia and to know what he knew, when he knew it, and how he knew it, and to discern how that connection to Putin affected the election, i.e. to question the legitimacy of this election
• protest Trump's abominable Cabinet nominees
• protest his conflicts of interest, thinking he is impeachable today!
• try to put the brakes on Trump's most egregious promises, beginning with the proposed wall and deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants.

It certainly seems like I have been marching since the great 60's in this country, but this march was really amazing!!  A mass of people standing up for social justice and standing up to a bully, who has no mandate from the people, whose trigger reactions are scary beyond belief, and whose first actions portend a dire regressive turn in our country.

Trump's first actions:  Begin the rollback of Obamacare, eliminate the cuts in mortgage premium insurance rates, removal of references to Climate Change and LGBT issues and berating journalists for their accurate reporting on his paltry inauguration numbers, to be supported by a Press Secretary who cites "alternative facts" about those same attendance figures.  Who will ever believe him?  Not a good beginning!

If there is one motto appropriate to the times, surely this Jefferson quote stands out!

Friday, on the day of the inauguration, I also marched in protest at the Federal Building in San Jose' and my husband and I hung a black tie around one of our house columns, because our nation is not the one we knew.

As Mayor Sam Liccardo tweeted on the Day of the Women's March, "This is what democracy looks like!"

Discharged! Donald Trump lands in America! Don't normalize, Organize, Resist!!

Definition of a daymare:  :  "a nightmarish fantasy experienced while awake"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/daymare

further from Merriam Webster Dictionary

"Did You Know?

Long ago, the word nightmare designated an evil spirit that made its victims feel like they were suffocating in their sleep (prompting physician-botanist William Turner to introduce "a good remedy agaynst the stranglyng of the nyght mare" in 1562). By the early 1700s, the Age of Reason had arrived, nightmares were bad dreams, and "daymare" was a logically analogous choice when English speakers sought a word for a frightening and uncontrollable fantasy, a run-away daydream. And since the 1800s, when Charles Dickens wrote "a monstrous load that I was obliged to bear, a daymare that there was no possibility of breaking in, a weight that brooded on my wits" in David Copperfield, we’ve been using "daymare" figuratively. For example, today we might refer to "a logistical daymare.""

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/daymare

This morning when I awoke and started ambling along, remembering the inauguration to come in six days, I had a daymare!  

I remembered when I was 12 years old, practicing in air raid drills, how to become prepared for bombs coming from Russia! I remembered how me and my classmates hid under our desks during those air raid drills! It was the Fifties after all!!  The age of bomb shelters and air raid drills!!

The daymare went like this!  We have finally been bombed, and, indeed, the bomb apparently did get discharged from Russia. After all these years, the bomb has finally been launched, and has landed, in the form of Donald Trump, delivered after all these years, despite detente and all that!

What a daymare, it is!!  

Karit Hummer 

The Immigrant Story: No 2000 mile wall and No Muslim Registry!!

Remember our roots. With the exception of the Native American, our family histories all include an immigrant story. Look at this iconic image of a family of early last century, having arrived at Ellis Island, viewing the Statue of Liberty for the first time, having brought all their hopes and dreams for a better life, and, at once, bringing to these shores their great sense of family values and hopeful, dedicated spirit, enriching their new homeland forever. Let us be the Welcoming nation we always have been!