Walk 5: I Walk in Your Name

 For My Sisters: I Walk In Your Names

I walk in the names of my four sisters: Rebecca, Abi, Alexi, and Sarah.

I walk in the name of my mother, Kerry.
I walk in names of all the women I love, and also for every other female in our country. 

I walk to raise awareness about the injustice of the reversal of Roe versus Wade.

I walk in Washington D.C.

 I walk the length of the National Mall, all the way from the Lincoln Memorial, historically the heart of civic protests, east toward our nation’s capital, veering North, aiming for the top of the steps, the steps of the United States Supreme Court.

 

I walk with empathy and compassion, with dignity and strength, but also,

I WALK WITH OUTRAGE!

I walk the same path as so many have before me, walking to the seat of our nation’s power 

to fight for equality and justice, TO FIGHT FOR CHANGE.

I walk not only because they asked me to, I walk because today I want to.

I always felt that I was just a singular drop, an insignificant voice.

 Today, among many though, I am the ocean.

And the wave is coming. 

I am part of it all.

 

On my walk, I make eye contact with each person I encounter, 

stopping to engage with those willing to listen. 

I ask them to consider what this ruling represents. 

 For some, it is disbelief, devastation and grief. 

For others, it is a day of celebration. 

 

One woman responded to me, 

“As, I ponder this day of existence, I’m deeply saddened, as it feels as though I’m residing in a matrix.” 

Another replied, “So it's my body, my choice, when it comes to getting the Covid vaccine, 

but it's my body, NOT my choice, when it comes to my reproductive rights?"

And I listen as one man says, 

“Women now have fewer reproductive rights than their mothers and grandmothers.”

 

And one family joyfully shouted at me, 

"God, has prevailed. No more abortions!"

In our country, to protest peacefully is a right, and so evidently obvious today, 

is the right to one’s opinion and also the right to voice extreme opposition.

It is shocking to witness it all on my walk across the National Mall to the Supreme Court.

There is no escape from protest and opinion.

 

In the name of my loved ones, and their own, I ask the people I pass, what will the future hold? 

The responses hold fear and fanaticism. I hear politicized rhetoric.

 

Autonomous choice threatened, personal power revoked,

my sisters ask me to consider how it would feel if the government mandated that I could not choose for myself what to do with my own body and my own future. 

I would feel imprisoned. 

 

In protest, I would have dressed as Uncle Sam and handcuffed my sisters to me

as a sign of their subjugation by our government.  

That is how we would have walked together, if they could have been here with me. 

Instead, I walk alone in their names, for a cause that before I believed was only theirs. 
 Now I so strongly realize, the cause has become mine as well.

I walk in your name Rebecca, your name Abi, your name Alexi, your name, Sarah.

Reaching my destination, the Supreme Court steps are blocked, fenced in, barricaded. 

Police, National Guard and SWAT teams are here on high alert.

The people light candles, they shout, they sing, they yell.

Some get arrested, some get in fights, some just hold space.

I observe on my walk another day of our nation's history in the making.