When was the last time this woman looked in the mirror?

Via Free Lance-Star:

On Jan. 20, Susan Kosior pulled on a black coat and gray hat, collected her 7-year-old daughter, Leah, and walked out the door of her sunny-yellow house on a quiet street in a southern Stafford neighborhood.

Soften-spoken and articulate, Kosior was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fredericksburg who was working on a master’s degree in library science—a self-described political independent and unlikely activist.

Yet on this day, as thousands headed north under gray skies to celebrate the swearing in of Donald Trump as president, Kosior and her daughter joined several hundred others at Hurkamp Park in Fredericksburg for what organizers called a silent inauguration.

For 15 minutes, under a sea of umbrellas and at times holding her daughter close, Kosior stood quietly in opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.

The next day, she joined half a million others in the Women’s March on Washington. Over the next several months, she would participate in protests and vigils, become a Stafford County elections official, participate in political fundraisers and write thousands of postcards for candidates she supported.

Kosior had stepped off the sidelines. By summer’s end, she’d be in the headlines.

After the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August, she joined a growing group of voices calling for the removal of a giant Confederate flag flying 80 feet above Interstate 95 in Falmouth. The flag was on private property, though, put there legally, and when efforts to get it taken down failed, Kosior got a permit to erect an equally large flagpole in her backyard on which to fly a Black Lives Matter banner.

An online campaign to fund it raised more than $8,000 toward a $25,000 goal before fizzling out. It was not enough to pay for the flagpole itself, much less its construction, and Kosior said this month that she has decided not to build it after all.

She’ll soon be packing up the sunny yellow house for her native New York, where she accepted a job a few weeks ago as a library director. Kosior is offering refunds to anyone who donated to what she’d dubbed the Freedom Pole.

“I’m sad it didn’t happen, but I’m glad it got people talking,” Kosior said. “If you can get people talking about hard issues, that’s more important than anything else.”