Story and photo by Saki Kambe
Approximately 1,000 people, women and men combined, turned out for the third annual Olympic Peninsula Women’s Wave to march down Water Street in Port Townsend on Jan 20. Despite the overcast typical-Washington sky, the event began with brass band music and a lot of colorful posters.
Linda Brewster, a board member of Fix Democracy First, proudly puts up her sign.
She described her sign, ”WAMEND which asked for constitutional Amendment to overturn the Supreme Court decision. It stems back all the way to the 1800s.They gave the corporations the constitutional rights of persons. And women haven’t yet achieved that. This is not something that everyone knows or understands, so I made this because it’s catchy, and people will ask me.”
“It’s all about this wonky, systemic issues that affect us all. And we can’t move on without fixing this. So it’s not all about overturning Citizens United either. Because Citizens United was based on a whole plethora of previous decisions that gave corporations, first of all personhood, constitutional rights of people.”
She added: “And secondly, the speech rights; that they are spending of money was equivalent. This is an important thing that they didn’t have a mouth. Then what did they have? They did have money, so therefore their spending of money should be considered to be their speech. And their spending of money has overwhelmed us.”
Abigail Vidals, an alumna of Peninsula College made a speech at the march about immigrants rights in collaboration with the Jefferson County Immigrants Rights Advocats JCIRA. She was asked to speak Courtney Morales, who does the volunteer work with JCIRA. Vidals’ speech revolved around the topic of immigrants, more specifically undocumented immigrants.
”I have seen the struggle immigrants go through firsthand through the experiences of my own immigrant parents,” Vidals said.
“The hardships and sacrifices that they went through is a story shared by many immigrants who come to this country. Many are labeled as criminals but they just come here to find a better life and a better future for their families.” Vidals said, with a emphasis that this is not the story that only applies to herself and her family.
She ended her speech stating solidarity with the many important movements going on today: “Love is love; water is life. Black lives matter. No Muslim registry. Trans is beautiful. Immigrants make America great. Women’s rights are human rights.”