The March

By Audrey Buhain and Xuanlin Tham

We don’t live in America, but we’ve read and watched and listened. We remember when Barack Obama became the first African-American President of the United States with a shimmering hope that we were perhaps still too young to fully understand. We remember the day marriage equality was legalised across the United States in striking, joyous clarity. The day Hillary Clinton was named presidential candidate and her gender had no consequence on her eligibility. They were moments when the unthinkable was won, and the world was electric with possibility and hope.

But that election day - the first one we were old enough to really witness and understand - we were riveted to our screens, staring at the culmination of what had been an unpredictable and shocking election campaign. We hoped against hope that everything we’d learned and believed about America was true. Liberty, acceptance, love - they’d come through again, no matter what.

They didn’t. Here was a demagogue who had seemingly brought out the monsters from where they were crouched, subdued, but raring to strike. The tablecloth was whisked away, and uncertainty and apprehension stared the world in its face. State after state turned red. Hundreds rejoiced in the streets, but we were filled with dread - America had made her decision, and it was irreversible.

We live in the Philippines - oceans away from feeling any real, tangible effects of American domestic politics - but the fear that sits cold in our stomachs is physical, at times sickening. Because, America, we think a lot of people our age look to you: we’ve grown up thinking of you as the place where everything is possible, where opportunity calls for us if only we’d reach out to seize it, where the power of individuality and the power of community serve to empower rather than tear each other down. Most of all, we think that we look at you as somewhere anyone can belong.

We’re older now, a little less naive: we know we live in a world that is nowhere near free of prejudice and ignorance. But when a country chooses these values in its leaders, it feeds those same monsters lying in wait everywhere else. It teaches children watching the news that they are allowed to say things that demean and disrespect women. It teaches them that people who don't look like them or speak like them don't belong. It tells the rest of the world that targeting and stigmatising an entire people and entire nations is just ‘politics’. It reduces people’s bodies, lives, and rights to bargaining chips in the hands of the privileged. It erases the progress we’ve made towards a kinder, more just world - progress that so many have bled for and died for.

Humanity is complex and not always what we desperately wish to believe it is. These past few months have proven that - but they've also proven something else.

Courtesy of Mario Tama/Getty Images

On the 21st of January, 500,000 people gathered in the streets of Washington, a crowd far greater than that of the inauguration the day before - a symbol, a reminder, that America’s strength will always be in its diversity. Hands, voices, bodies, carrying a promise to stand together, to understand each other’s struggles, to turn pain into power through compassion and solidarity. Federal judges putting their livelihoods at stake, choosing to reject executive orders that violate human rights. Hundreds encircling Muslim students at the University of Michigan as they prayed, bodies forming a barrier to protect their classmates’ rights to religious expression. People opening up their homes for those left stranded by the travel ban. New Yorkers scrubbing away Nazi propaganda on the subway with hand sanitiser.

These are the stories our children should be watching on the news. This is how we begin to heal.

Courtesy of Benji Bear Photography

Courtesy of Gregory Locke

Listen to people’s fears. Be open-minded, be kind. Learn to understand privilege and take responsibility for the power of your voice and actions. Let someone know they aren't alone, that their pain isn’t something they have to shoulder by themselves. Defend the most marginalised among us because doing so defends all of us. Don't let those little things slide. It's never just locker room talk.

For in every single one of us, there is the courage that moves us to fight back; there is a voice demanding to be heard; there is an unbelievable capacity for love and empathy that defines us and unites us and keeps us going through the most difficult of times.

To everyone hurting right now: we know these things must sit even heavier in your hearts than they do in ours; we hope you are able to find solace in the tireless human spirit that exists even in the most unlikely of places, slowly but surely healing the wounds of history.

To people of colour, immigrants, women, and LGBT folk; to those of diverse religious faith; to anyone left scared and isolated; to everyone who marches in the name of equality, justice, and the power of the people:

We march with you.

Audrey Buhain and Xuanlin Tham are two high school students who write the way kids at the beach gather sand to form sandcastles; in other words, messily, everywhere at once, but hopefully still creating something to be proud of.

Click this to listen to BSM students and teachers respond to the question 'what message do you have for anyone feeling scared or isolated right now?'

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