Editors note: The following is an account from one participant’s experience in the protests with quotes from other participants.
Two nights after the arguably most stunning American presidential election in our country’s history, around 600 individuals gathered in Northern Baltimore and marched to peacefully protest Donald Trump’s victory. We poured through the streets, weaving like broken guitar strings around buses and cars towards Inner Harbor. We plucked our voices from our emotions, with fingers stretched and longing for a constant future to hold. Our chants of “Not My President” and “We Reject the President Elect” cracked against buildings like bongos. Maybe the concrete could absorb some of the terror we experienced for the past 48 hours. We were only one city of the many that reacted in mass demonstrations after Mr. Donald Trump’s surprise election win.
Onlookers supported the protest with zeal, honking, rolling down their windows, videotaping, and flashing a thumbs up. Freshman Henry Salem of Vermont says, “The police involvement was enabling”; officers partitioned off streets, directed traffic, and escorted us through the city.
Emotions varied for many of us protestors. The deeply-entrenched resentment was palpable to the point where our voices shuddered with it. Rushabh Doshi, a freshman from Los Angeles, notes that the mood prior to the protest was indeed “gloomy,” but as we started to march, a sense of “energy, hope, and inspiration” developed: like gears wiping away dirt and churning once again. Sharada Narayanan, a freshman from outside of Seatte, speculates that, “The initial feelings of hopelessness are slowly dissolving and are being replaced with a desire to take action.”
Both sadly and hopefully, participating in this protest struck me with the universality of human pain. Each 600-some individuals in the Baltimore protest, the thousands in the nation-wide demonstrations, and all of the people terrified by the outcome of this election experienced similar emotions. Ages ranged from babies to teens to young adults to adults to elderly people, along with accents, ethnicities, genders, races, sexualities, and classes: but all of us strode past fear to the other side of hope. We know people who are the targets of Trump’s bigotry. We are those people. We are Americans. We will continue to defend the country we love.