Marching on...

After all the excitement and thrill of yesterday's voting, I finally took a moment after our poll closed to take a deep breath and check out the day's mail.

This had arrived in my mailbox:

It stopped me in my tracks. It's not that I didn't know about Amartya Sen's groundbreaking work. I knew that Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, had documented the number of girls who are missing from the planet earth because girls are not as valued as boys. I knew the number.

100 million.

But coming off of the excitement of our little group, and the voting, and the idea that we will be making it possible for a doctor to go the Congo to help repair and heal women and girls who have been traumatized by rape used as a weapon of war, the number just stopped me in my tracks.

100 million.

All of a sudden, our achievement, which a minute ago had seemed so bright, seemed pitifully tiny.

100 million.

All of a sudden, a wave of sadness broke over me.

100 million.

All of a sudden, our long road to fairness stretched so far out into the distance that I couldn't see its end.

And then I realized what we need.

We need 100 million. That's how many people it is going to take to turn the tide, once and for all, of this ancient prejudice. We need 100 million people to join our march - one for every girl who is not here simply because she was a girl.

We have 269 and it's a very good start.

And now we do the only thing there is to do: we take a moment to celebrate the achievement we have won, and we join hands, and we keep marching on.