Civilly Disobedient (Calm Act Genesis Book 1) (2 page)

“No, it wasn’t,” he agreed. “But several people died. Maybe a couple dozen taken to the hospital. Police got awfully rough on the protesters. Deanna Jo was pretty mad that got edited out. ‘For length.’”

“Gotta leave room for those puppy segments,” I muttered. Dan’s group, us, provided the websites that supported UNC’s market-leading evening newscast. One of my pet peeves was just how much national and world news UNC omitted in favor of dog stories.

“I don’t like it,” Mangal warned. “You should buy a burner phone, keep in touch. Or not go. The Philadelphia rally is expected to be way bigger than Boston, Dee. This could get ugly.”

“OK,” I agreed. “Thanks.”

Mangal nodded off-handedly. “No problem. Telecommuting,” he added with a crooked grin. “That was brilliant.” My commute was only an hour each way on the train. He had all that, plus a much longer drive to the station. “You’ll have time for a relationship again,” he teased, with a grin.

“What for,” I said quellingly. I hadn’t dated since I bought the house and started the long commute. But my last few relationships were nothing to miss. There’s so much social pressure for a woman to believe she ‘needs’ a relationship and children. I didn’t ‘need’ any such thing. I disliked needy men, and didn’t see why they’d like me being needy, either. Mangal had a point, though. Telecommuting, at least I’d have time for such things if an interesting guy happened along.

On the way home from the train, I grabbed us a couple GPS-free cheap burner phones, paying in cash to keep them untraceable, and purchased a pre-paid credit card while I was at it. I could slip Mangal the phone at work on Friday before my little adventure.

Interesting fact: It is unclear what ignited the riots in Boston. The event was planned as a peaceful demonstration of about 50,000 people, to protest growing income inequality and skyrocketing food prices. Boston was one of the best-off metropolitan areas in the country at the time.

“So you’re the fresh meat!” the guy greeted me with a grin, hunkering down in the aisle next to my seat on the bus. “Hogan, one of the organizers. You?”

I should have been prepared for that question. But his leer and ‘fresh meat’ comment threw me. “Um…Bea. Nice to meet you, Hogan. Oh, here, I wanted to contribute for gas. Will eighty dollars do?” I rummaged and handed him a little sheaf of twenties.

“Absolutely!” he crooned happily. He folded the bills and tucked them into his pocket. “I’ll get you a T-shirt in a minute.”

Hogan looked a few years younger than me, probably mid-twenties. His head was clipped almost military short, his arms rich in tribal tattoos. He wore a tasteful silver cuff on one ear, plus tiny studs. His build was strong and rangy, with erect posture. His light brown beard was a neatly trimmed quarter inch long. He was a fashionable guy compared to the other organizer up front kibitzing with the bus driver, a frumpy fifty-something woman dressed as a hippie wannabee, adrift in anachronism. The vivid kelly green T-shirts proclaimed them both members of Weather Vane, one of the movements sponsoring the event in Philadelphia.

“Mind if I sit with you a bit, Bea?” He gestured, and I scooted to the window seat. He sat and leaned toward me to ask, “You’re the Bea Smith who signed up Wednesday night, right?”

“Ah, yes,” I agreed. “I have a little employer problem, you see. They don’t think I should go to the rally in Philly. I hope I’m not taking a seat from someone else?”

Of course I wasn’t. The bus had half a dozen empty seats. And eighty bucks was more than generous for gas money.

“Really? What employer is that?” We both laughed. “You’d probably rather not say.”

“Yeah. No,” I agreed. “But, my real name is Dee, not Bea.”

“Alright. What draws you to Weather Vane, Dee? Philadelphia, anyway.”

“I’m not very political,” I replied, feeling foolish. “I guess free speech and surveillance are hot buttons with me. The velvet fascism thing. I mean, even this. I couldn’t take a train to Philadelphia because of my job spying on me. Can’t use public transportation without ID. I appreciate the ride. I’m also very concerned about climate change.”

He nodded, looking amused. “Kind of a political tourist, huh?”

Hogan launched into telling me about Weather Vane and its agenda. Philadelphia wasn’t a one-issue rally. About a dozen activist groups were spear-heading the thing, that just seemed to keep mushrooming. They now hoped for over a quarter million demonstrators this weekend, complaining about everything from free speech, to the cost of living, getting rid of the strangle-hold of the two-party system, racism, and a half-dozen other perennial American discontents that just seemed to get worse every year, never better.

Weather Vane’s angle was climate change and the risk of irrevocable environmental damage. Hogan laid out his case. The drought in the high plains, now in its third year and getting scary. He claimed it was developing into another full-blown Dust Bowl, and the aquifers were running dry. The desert southwest and California had been in severe drought even longer, with fires raging out of control. That was what drove our food prices soaring, even before the new GMO blight.

Here in the rainy zones, storms kept getting worse. The cost of storm damage was mounting exponentially, while Federal and state disaster relief budgets groaned under the onslaught. Overseas, the Middle Eastern wars were getting worse all the time. The news and political rhetoric focused on terrorism. But underneath was a dire drought in a severely overpopulated region.

Hogan spoke well. He had charisma, his facts were in order, and he presented a compelling case, with the eyes of a zealot and a trustworthy smile.

“We need a complete national pivot,” he concluded. “No more business as usual. There isn’t time left for incremental change. Climate change is completely out of control, and we need to stop carbon emissions
now
. Get our economy on a carbon-free footing. Before it’s too late.”

“I agree,” I replied weakly. “But…”

“Our politicians are owned by the corporations,” Hogan said. “So it’s business as usual while the planet is destroyed. But this is still a democracy. We have to make ourselves heard before it’s too late.”

I sighed. “Well, I’ll count as one more warm body at a demonstration. But there are millions of people yelling, Hogan. And they demand a hundred different things.”

“But climate change is the root cause of all the yelling,” he claimed.

I shrugged. “Preaching to the choir.” He smiled bashfully and nodded assent. “Hogan, I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. And I’m here. Today that’s all I can do. You know?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Thanks for showing up, Dee.” He squeezed my shoulder as he rose, and moved on to chat with the next person on the bus.

I ignored my paperback and looked out the window. After an early start, we were approaching New York City around 8 a.m. on Saturday. Traffic was backed up for thirty miles in every direction. The other lanes, outbound from the city, heading to Cape Cod and the islands for the long weekend, were a parking lot, not moving at all. But even the inbound lanes were stop-and-go. From the year’s freaky winter and storms, the interstate sported massive pot-holes, with one or two lanes blocked off at a time for repair. Car exhaust and millions of holiday weekend travelers mingled into a massive fug of frustration and smog.

I considered my can-do’s. I took public transportation whenever possible. I grew my own vegetables. I tried to eat locally grown food – no hardship there, living on the Connecticut shore. The local vegetable and fruit supply was excellent. I used power sparingly. Maybe I could telecommute. Maybe I could get 30 or more people to telecommute from my branch at work.

Maybe I could quit my job and do something more to stop climate change. My comfortable, successful, downright fun career working with great people. No, I loved my work at UNC, no matter how irritating the employee surveillance was. Looking at the millions of cars on I-95, the millions of homes in New York City, my actions couldn’t make a dent in the scale of the problem, even locally.

Well, I was open to the possibility. I turned back to my book. Hogan remembered to slip me my garish new green T-shirt, with an encouraging smile. He slid in beside me to talk some more and while away the miles.

-oOo-

The Philadelphia throng wasn’t just a few times bigger than Boston. Philadelphia boasts that 40% of the population of the U.S. lives within an easy day’s drive. A whole lot of them drove to the rally that Saturday. The downtown one-way streets were completely gridlocked. After nearly an hour, the bus driver simply opened the door and pointed which direction to start walking.

Not that it was hard to guess. There were plenty of people on the streets headed thataway, after all.

“Great success, huh?” Hogan cried, providing me an unneeded hand off the bus. “Woot! Weather Vane central says we’ve got half a million so far!” He was grinning from ear to ear.

I wished I could share his enthusiasm. Mostly I wondered whether the city of Philadelphia had signed off on this. Why hadn’t I stayed home to enjoy the beach today, like Mangal? “Where and when do I rendezvous with the bus home?” I asked in concern.

“Ah, don’t know yet,” he said. “But it’s the Weather Vane bus to New Haven. Just ask later at one of our organizer tents. Have a great time, Dee!”

I grinned back at him gamely. As soon as I was out of his sight, I prudently ducked into an air conditioned bar/restaurant to eat and use the restroom before joining the march. I enjoyed an authentic Philly cheese-steak, dripping with grease, with a side of cole slaw. Couldn’t visit Philadelphia without that.

I took a moment to check in with Mangal on my burner phone. I let him know that I had arrived and was fine so far. He checked the news for me, but saw nothing about the protest growing to half a million people. Exaggeration? Or news blackout? I asked the waiter about the local news, which played on a TV behind the bar. She said they didn’t mention Philadelphia being inundated with a third again its own population in visiting demonstrators. But the crowd did seem a lot bigger than usual. Perhaps Hogan’s numbers were inflated, I thought.

It was tempting to stay in the air conditioned comfort of the bar and skip the march. Hazy and sunny, it was already an unseasonable 94 degrees and humid outside, even before the mid-afternoon heat. The forecast expected to break the 99 degree all-time record high for the day. But, I was here to be counted. As concerned, or something. And I had to admit, I was concerned about climate change – record-breaking high temperatures, for instance. So I changed into Hogan’s gaudy green T-shirt, topped up my water bottle and applied some sunscreen, and hit the streets again.

The streets were even more crowded now than when I ducked into the bar. My tributary stream of pedestrians was shunted over a block by the police, to flow into a street cordoned off to vehicle traffic for the marchers.

Though hot and boring, the walk provided good people-watching and eavesdropping opportunities. The throng seemed to me a pretty ordinary cross-section of middle class America. Heavily weighted toward the mid-Atlantic states, of course, but some mentioned driving in from as far away as Michigan and Georgia. I didn’t read the crowd as angry so much as frustrated.

A single mother worried about how she would feed her kids when school let out for summer, because school supplied them free breakfast and lunch now. Lots of people unemployed and underemployed. Everyone complained about food prices. The continuing drought out west, and now the GMO blight, took a major toll on industrial-scale agriculture. Food prices had risen 150% so far this year, on top of 100% last year. Suddenly food rivaled housing costs in the household budget. Most people didn’t have that kind of money left over after paying the bills. If they had savings, they were drawing them down. But many, especially the ones with crushing student loan and medical debt, had no savings.

Housing costs were headed up, too. So close to Long Island Sound, with ‘100-year’ storms now a semi-annual event, my own home owner’s insurance was rising 25% a year. One guy mentioned his insurance rates tripled before he gave up and canceled the policy. His house was in a newly designated flood plain. The waters had risen to his front steps twice lately. I was glad I lived on a ridge.

And then there was Congress. I think it’s safe to say that no one marching down that street was a fan of Washington. But there were a surprising number of elderly marching on that street, protesting the new useless Medicare voucher program and cuts to Social Security. Their AARP ‘Walking Dead’ black protest T-shirts were particularly unfortunate, soaking up the unseasonable heat as the mercury continued to rise. Fortunately, the traffic-directing cops weren’t willing to tell Grandma she couldn’t sit on a car or exit the march route. The senior citizens went wherever they felt like, and walking progress frequently stumbled to a stop to let them through.

My Weather Vane green was a minority color. Most Americans saw the problem as their own pocketbooks, not the climate chaos driving the economic misery. Even the budget cuts to health care for the elderly were justified by Congress as necessary due to the exploding FEMA disaster relief outlays. But most people didn’t connect those dots. The market-leading news broadcast I worked for, UNC, continued to pretend climate change was only one theory, not a driving force, only possibly related to our economic pain. UNC marketing claimed that Americans preferred to think they had a choice whether to believe in climate change.

They had a choice whether to believe in Santa Claus, too. That didn’t make the choice
valid.

Nonetheless, the majority of the protesters around me complained about the economy, not climate change. A few times, I attempted to point out the climate change underlying an economic woe to a neighbor on the march. After the third person shot me down, saying we couldn’t afford to deal with climate change, I gave up.

I could have found other green shirts to march with. But I’d only joined Weather Vane for a ride to Philadelphia, and felt like a fraud.