✨The Bright Side✨ 5.2 million people showed up

And we're just getting started

Okay, technically, we already had a Bright Side newsletter this week because I couldn’t hold back the good news from Tuesday. If you missed it, go catch up on why I’m still buzzing with energy from the Wisconsin Supreme Court election results… and yes, even the two seats we didn’t win in Florida:

✨The Bright Side✨ Special Edition: Unlike Cory Booker, I can’t hold it

But today’s edition is about what happened this weekend. And I’m still on the verge of tears, probably from a mix of joy and feeling completely overstimulated after yesterday’s protests.

It was incredible.

Portland gifted us a stunning, sunny day, and people showed up. I felt like the dog in the movie Up, surrounded by squirrels.

Except in this case, the “squirrels” were people holding signs and marching against this power grab by the worst president in my lifetime and his billionaire bestie.

My daughter had a birthday party and couldn’t march with me. But she helped me make my sign and told me how fun it was to work on protest signs together. That felt like a little win on its own.

This morning, she asked,

“Mamá, how many people were at the protests? 1,000? 5,000?”

I told her to keep going.

She didn’t even get close. Her jaw dropped when I told her the final tally:

5.2 MILLION.

Yes. Five point two million people across the country showed up this weekend. That’s breathtaking. And hopeful. And powerful.

But here’s where I’ll be real with you. We have a huge opportunity to make that number even bigger.

After the march, my friend

Lindsay Meyer-Harley

and I stopped for a drink. I asked the bartender if they had expected the crowds. And she said:

“We didn’t know this was happening.”

My jaw almost hit the floor. But then my husband said, “If I didn’t live with you, I wouldn’t have known either.”

And that’s when it clicked.

This is our opportunity.

If each one of the 5.2 million people who showed up brings just one more person next time, we double it. We get closer to reaching a powerful tipping point.

yvettenicolebrown

A post shared by @yvettenicolebrown

This video gave me chills. And it was filmed in my hometown, Portland, Oregon!

There’s research from Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, that has stuck with me ever since I read it:

“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts, and those engaging a threshold of 3.5 percent of the population have never failed to bring about change.”

Read the article here.

So what’s next? April 19.

That’s the next big one. Save the date. Bring a friend. Bring five. Post about it. Talk about it. Most people in our lives probably haven’t heard of this movement. They won’t know unless we tell them.

And we have every reason to tell them because this is what hope in action looks like.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

I read this newsletter today, and I want to share one of my favorite parts:

"I heard one woman describe the rally to another by saying that it felt less like a single unifying movement than a collection of different issues—pockets of people expressing themselves on a wide range of topics. And I felt the same way. There were signs about autocracy and oligarchs, social security and vaccines, democracy and decency. People were talking about the threat to science, the widespread corruption, and the attacks on trans rights.

I don’t see the lack of a unified message as a weakness. Because this is what the fight is about. It’s about the future... of everything."

If you went to a protest yesterday, would you mind commenting and sharing some of your favorite photos?

I’m usually not the best at taking photos. I get into the moment and forget to pull out my phone. But here are a few of the ones I took yesterday here in Portland!

Happy Sunday,