The Women’s March — 2025

Justice was never going to be easy. It wasn’t even going to be merely hard. Justice is the impossible dream, the stuff of fantasies like Neverland and El Dorado and Narnia. Nonetheless, justice fades only when we forget it’s a journey, not a destination. Marching on the road to justice is like orienteering with a map where every direction forward has a marker reading, “Here be Monsters.” Still, we march.

When women marched in 2017, it was with defiance and pride generated from decades of progress toward equality and respect. Eight years later, the skies are darker, the uncharted routes more treacherous and threatening; today, the dark lords are looking down from satellites instead of gilded towers. Women have been reminded once again, “A woman’s work is never done.”

It’s a hard lesson, but then it’s always been hard. The irony of the myth of blind justice is just that: it’s a myth, an ideal, a goal too seldom realized in the hard context of bought governments, bought judges, and bought media.

In Modesto, the 2025 Women’s March was on January 18. It was quieter and smaller than the one in 2017. Some will think the diminished numbers mark a sign of defeat, but then resolve has always been quieter and more durable than anger.

Resolve stitches up the ragged ends of loss into new beginnings. Resolve skirts the peaks and valleys of ire and vengeance; it pioneers a different topography.

Resolve is a sober reckoning with the obdurate and seemingly immovable barriers of high walls, locked gates and barred doors. It flows instead of flares. Resolve rises slowly, even against the downward pressure of prejudicial power, inherited inertia and embalmed tradition.

The political history of women in the United States includes getting the right to vote over 100 years after it was bestowed on white males with property. It includes a movement toward true equality that began gaining force only sixty years ago. It includes the realization that definitions of “merit” and “legal” and “rights” are nearly always made from on high and nearly always come with hidden agendas.

More than anything, resolve includes the knowledge that justice isn’t about gender, or race, or class or places of origin. Justice is that universal value linked inextricably to equality under the law. Those who achieve higher ground only to find there are taller mountains ahead keep climbing. They march.

Today, the near horizon seems filled by a formidable army that could dominate the future and defer justice far beyond our lifetimes. See that army within the context of deep resolve and it’s only another would-be king and his mercenary court, a host of vainglorious pretenders attended by servile opportunists eager to debase themselves in extravagant demonstrations of fealty and craven tribute.

Meanwhile, justice has mustered its own army. Recruits with names like Greta, Alexandria, and Jacinda are marching forward and upward “on the road to glory, where the story never ends.” They are young and strong and carry with them the courage, the wisdom, and the history of those who’ve gone before. They are not going back.