November 9th, 2016, was a day I will always remember as the day that I thought all hope was gone. I went to sleep the night before early because I thought Hillary had it in the bag. I believed that my country had made the right choice for other young people and for our futures. But I was proven wrong. When I woke up on November 9th, 2016 and saw the news, everything went black and my head went numb. I felt as though I had lost a war I didn’t even know I was fighting. But then I got myself together, and I got my friends together and we organized. We weren’t going to take this lying down.
But then things died down for the next month because we all conditioned ourselves to ignore the inevitable. In our small Illinois town, we were sheltered from the politics of what was actually happening. Things became easy to ignore. We forgot what was happening until we had a bigot in office on January 20th, 2017 and it felt the exact same way it did over two months prior. So we did what we did the last time, but this time we did it bigger and better. We rallied.
The Springfield Call To Action Rally only had about 1000 people there, but the energy was infectious. There was so much love and support surging through the small town streets I could have sworn that my skin turned to steel and we were all invincible because together, could anything bad really happen?
I listened to what the speakers had to say, I observed the intense diversity that surrounded me, and I learned so much. I’ve always been disappointed and frustrated by the fact that I have never lived in a big city, but today with all of the hidden gems of my conservative town, we conquered. I learned not only about local issues and how they are so intricately connected to national ones, but I also learned that change can start anywhere and that I need not be discouraged by the immediate ridicule I face in my high school or anywhere else my opinions are unpopular because no matter where I am, there will always be solidarity. There will always be sisterhood, you just have to look for it.
Today over 1 million sisters, brothers, and otherwise showed for justice and I could not be more proud to be a part of it, because history can, and was, made everywhere.
