March for Life
Written by Katie Beemer
The night air was cool against our cheeks as we boarded buses to take the long overnight trip to Washington D.C. on a Wednesday night.
Around 50 Hillsdale students, bags and pillows in hand, were prepared to make the 10 hour bus ride to the March for Life, an annual event in Washington D.C. where members of the pro-life movement gather to protest the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
Students from every area of campus came. Looking around, there were people who had attended the March for multiple years, and there were people who were attending for the first time. There were athletes, Greeks, Honors students, students from every major. This was not limited to one type of student, and that was even clearer when we arrived.
Around 50 students from a school the size of Hillsdale is an impressive proportion of campus; we felt like a large contingent. But, compared to the actual March itself, we were tiny. That was part of the magic, though. Here was our group, small as though we may be, surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people all marching for the same purpose.
There was not one kind of person at the March. We saw children and parents, nuns, people from every denomination of Christianity, people who were there for secular reasons. There were monks, there were babies. Whole busses of people drove from California for this event. The enormity of it all was a little overwhelming. I did not expect that sheer number of people to be there.
It struck me, that even with all of that diversity surrounding us—we were all there from different religious backgrounds, we all had different specific reasons for going, we all carried different signs, and we were all interested in different things—we were all united on this one issue. Our small, seemingly insignificant group from the tiny town of Hillsdale, Michigan, was much more than that. We were not 50 some college students out for a day in D.C.; we were part of a larger movement, this movement to preserve life above all else.
It was funny, that even in the chaos of everything happening, as we were holding our Hillsdale College banner, people were still coming up to us thanking us for what our college was doing. And it was interesting, knowing that while we made up much less than 1% of the people there, we were still representing something far greater than ourselves. As cliché as it sounds, we were there asking for the good, the true, and the beautiful to be preserved. We were there for life to be preserved.
Katie Beemer is a #fantasticfreshman from #puremichigan in pursuit of a degree in #politics, which should say a lot about the state of her mind. She is an #extremeextrovert, uses hashtags excessively/inappropriately, and is the proud owner of a pet reindeer named Edgar John Cervantes III #itsalongstory. When she’s not wandering around the library looking for people to talk to, she occasionally does homework #cantstopwontstop.