Take back the night, they say.

I passed a massive group of protesters marching down 20th on my way home tonight.
"20th is for women walking!" someone yelled and tears sprung immediately to my eyes.
I've thought this before. I've yelled this before. Can we really "take back the nights?"
I want to believe it!
Unfortunately, the very women this protest was for were still there, 5 blocks further west, unaware that liberation had come. And when it did? Well, the strip moves a block further north while the cars and attention and cop cars pass.
They are adaptable, these women of the night. Survival of the fittest.
2oth is indeed for women walking, and men stalking, and the rest of us quickly passing by before we are implicated with the whole sordid affair.
We're so disconnected from each other. We're so blind to the real factors that enslave these girls; the hungry mouths and the drug addictions to feed; the hopelessness and helplessness that inevitably follows a lifetime of being told you're worthless; the despair and isolation that comes with poverty.
Right now they walk for all of us. They parade around the fact that none of us cares enough to really stop it. So we march or chant or make a poster to ease the guilt or buff the pride, but in the end we do not love enough to offer hope. The kind of hope that actually ends oppression.
And so, 20th is indeed for women walking. And when the protesters go home, they'll keep on walking. It's what they do. They walk because for now, they've been offered no other choice.