Civilly Disobedient (Calm Act Genesis Book 1) (4 page)

It was after 6:00 when a National Guard truck rolled up with a loudspeaker. “This is an illegal demonstration. You are to sit in place until processed for arrest. You will be told when to exit the park. This is an illegal demonstration…”

Reese, on behalf of the boathouses, along with leaders from the protester tents, walked up to the truck to argue with them. The truck rolled on and left our spokes-folk shaking their heads in disgust.

Weather Vane or not, permit or no, the protest march was to have finished and dispersed by 6:00 p.m. According to the National Guard, we were all criminal agitators now.

Interesting fact: The GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) blight began with corn, the largest crop grown in the U.S. The identical genetic sequence was shared with GMO soy, cotton, and other crops. Soon the blight mutated and jumped to infect soy and cotton, exploiting the same genetic marker. All remaining GMO crops were burned in the fields. There was no GMO wheat or rice, so those crops were spared the blight. But American wheat harvests were ruined by drought in the high plains, the rice drowned by rains on the Gulf coast. The impact on the world food supply was devastating. Where U.S. consumers saw painful food prices, famine spread in Africa and the Middle East, as the world’s agricultural superpower ceased its exports.

I sure was glad of my couple thousand calories of Philly cheese steak. The AARP came around to beg everyone’s snacks to give to diabetics who weren’t prepared to spend the night. People who’d packed candy bars and junk food got to keep them. But the oldsters made off with my pricey stash of dried strawberries and apricots, cashews and smoked gouda cheese.

I passed the time lugging water and ice out to serve at our punchbowl table. And sat whenever I could for a few minutes. Computing is a desk job. I wasn’t used to walking and standing for so many hours at a stretch. My feet hurt.

The throng milling around the boathouses was rich in wild stories of the violent clash with the National Guard back beyond the museum. But I didn’t see anything worse than heat exhaustion and teargas after-effects. Maybe the Guard took care of the serious injuries.

After a few hours of mildly arduous milling around at this overcrowded accidental garden party, Weather Vane received word that it was our turn to leave the park. By then, Hogan and the other New Haven organizer had re-united our bus-load of demonstrators at the boathouse we staked out.

“Who thinks we should stay here and make a stand?” Hogan cried out to the group.

“I don’t,” I called out clearly, before he could rabble-rouse. “Hogan, the demonstration is over. We caused a nuisance. Now we’re just waiting to exit a park. It’s our turn. Let’s go.”

“But –” he attempted.

“She’s right!” another man called out. “We’re already late getting back to New Haven.”

And so Hogan’s last stand fizzled and died. The most defiance the group was willing to drum up was to carry along some hobbling AARP members, and others who ought to escape the park sooner rather than later. I selected an 8-year-old girl battling cancer and her mom. The girl was exhausted, adorable in a cheerful straw hat over her bald head. I carried her into the line. The child was light as a feather, the mother grateful for the reprieve.

A couple Guard transports showed up. We were to march between the trucks, escorted on the way out. The troops took one look at the sick and tired we’d collected, and bailed out of their trucks to give up their seats. I handed the girl over to a smiling youth in uniform, who tenderly passed her up into the truck. She giggled when he flirted with her. Her mom climbed up to ride beside her. It was a little thing. But I felt like I’d finally accomplished something, done some good, after trying all day.

-oOo-

“Have you ever been arrested before?” A weekend warrior with the National Guard shared a short fold-up banquet table with another soldier. A dozen such tables blocked the road, out-processing demonstrators.

“No, sir,” I supplied respectfully. “I don’t know why I would be arrested now. I went into the park legally, as part of a sanctioned demonstration. Then the exit was blocked. So I stayed in the park until I was allowed to leave. Is there a problem?”

He shrugged. “Social security number, please.” I supplied the digits while he input them into his laptop, apparently connected to a police clearinghouse. The public databases corroborated my story – no prior arrest record. “Thank you, Ma’am, you’re free to go.” I wondered sadly if the mere fact that I was checked would show up on my credit record. My employer UNC monitored credit reports on its managers.

The New Haven bus group was cleared, except for Hogan. With a prior record for civil disobedience, the National Guard screeners handed him over to the police.

“Go on ahead home without me!” Hogan called to us cheerfully, as he was escorted away by Philadelphia’s finest. “I’ve got train fare!” The police added him into a van of detainees.

We had to walk another dozen blocks to rendezvous with our bus, along the demonstration route. Unlike the still-mobbed park, these streets had been cleared of protesters, so I could clearly see the wreckage left in their wake. I gazed around in shock. When I’d walked past these little groceries and restaurants a few hours ago, this was a charming downtown, clean and friendly, if a bit edgy about the uninvited guests. The crowd had jostled, but behaved. Now litter was everywhere. Storefronts were smashed in. A corner grocery was broken into, shelving collapsed. Thousands of dollars in food lay spilled and broken on the floor by looters. A car stood on its side, riddled with bullet holes. On another block, a building and police car had caught fire.

We passed the bar where I’d grabbed a Philly cheese steak for lunch. It sported fresh plywood over a shattered plate glass window. The lights were on inside, with sounds of hammering. The restaurant owners worked into the night to repair the damage.

I didn’t do this. Of course I had no part in any of this senseless violence. I would never do this. But my face burned with shame as though I had. I was part of this demonstration. The peaceful, civil, helpful, park-strolling part of the rally, yes, but it was a demonstration of anger nonetheless. I was horrified by the signs, not of peaceful political statement, but of outright looting and rioting.

No wonder the Guard bottled us up in the park. They needed to control the riot out here before they dealt with the rest of us. I thought of the young Guardsman who tenderly joked with the little cancer-fighting girl I passed to him, to ride in the truck. The arrest-screening Guardsman who out-processed me. He probably worked a computer desk job like me on weekdays. The police who never said a harsher word to me than a simple, “Move along, Ma’am.” I was humbled that they could remain so civilized, knowing what havoc the rioters were wreaking out here in the streets. I felt humiliated for having been any part of this, whether I’d done anything wrong or not.

We found the bus and hit the road back to Connecticut around 10 p.m. By then, the roads weren’t quite so clogged. I managed to nap through most of New Jersey. But threading through the potholed highways to cross New York City was a misery, even at 1 a.m. on a Sunday. The truck traffic that supplied the massive city took to the night, to bypass the holiday consumer traffic. Unable to sleep through the wailing roar of the big rigs hauling their endless containers, while the bus jounced across rough road, I stared out at the artificial lights of the largest city in America. And I considered how to follow up on this.

I decided that the key problem I had with even a peaceful protest, was exactly who I wanted to do what. Sure, I had valid concerns. All the people at that demonstration did. But in truth, I had at least as much sympathy for the National Guard and police and the citizens of Philadelphia who were invaded. They’d done nothing to deserve it. They had no particular responsibility for solving the problems. And of course a violent protest, with rioting in the streets, did nobody any good.

My personal hero of the day was Reese, the boathouse mechanic. He could have told us to buzz off. The boathouse was private property. He didn’t have to open its doors to us. But he did. And not only that, he persuaded the other boathouse stewards to open up and help alleviate the weird situation as well. Good people.

If the point of the protest was to ‘be heard,’ we weren’t, at least not outside the immediate ruckus zone. The National Guard, and the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania authorities, and the civilians we inconvenienced or worse, certainly heard us loud and clear. But I’d checked in with Mangal again by phone when we boarded the bus. The general public seemed to be under a news blackout regarding the Philadelphia rout. A news blackout that my employer, UNC News, was complicit in.

I believed in Weather Vane’s issues. Climate change wasn’t a theoretical risk in the future. It was here and now, and the situation was making me ever more nervous. Politicians mouthed platitudes about leaving a better world for our grandchildren. But I didn’t think we had generations left. In fact, I wondered if time hadn’t run out already. I’m a gardener, a walker, a swimmer, a boater. I know the plants and animals and weather of the Connecticut shore, intimately as a lover. It was hard to tell, because weather is so variable. But the natural world was changing, and fast. The arguments I’d heard, that drought and extreme population pressure were the underlying cause of the violence in Africa and the Middle East, were convincing. The number of refugees was mounting around the globe. And now we had internal American refugees as well, as the droughts worsened out west.

In the pileup waiting to cross the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, I wondered just how much carbon emissions these American roads accounted for. If we all just stopped driving and turned off the streetlights, how many days would it take for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to start going down instead of up? I sighed, and decided ‘all of them’ probably weren’t enough. If somehow the entire U.S. stopped producing greenhouse gases for a year, from everything from roads to power plants to agriculture, it might still not be enough. We were big, but we weren’t the only ones.

I could only do one person’s worth. At least I was willing to do that.

-oOo-

The weekend wasn’t a total loss. I’d started a backyard vegetable garden the week I moved into my house. But the front and side still featured boring lawn and shrubbery, with a few token annual flowers to brighten up the place. Compared to the vibrant, lush green woods and salt marshes of Connecticut, that unloved lawn was an environmental dead zone.

I spent Sunday and Monday digging and building and planting in earnest. The lawn soil was garbage, so I mostly built raised beds on top of it, though some crops would fare well enough in the clay-like loam. I wouldn’t really have cared how much the garden cost, or how much work it would be to take care of it all. But with food prices soaring, my little ‘victory garden’ probably paid for itself the first year. And it isn’t like I had a man or pets or kids to smother with my love and attention. Just my career and work friends. Gardening every day was my antidote to the corporate thing, that daily descent into sterile cubicle land, hemmed in, shut away from the sky.

I loved my work. I really did. I just didn’t like being cut off from the natural world like I was. Especially not when it was in trouble, with the climate shifting.

I didn’t see Hogan again. I assume he was released the next day. But I made no effort to keep in touch with Weather Vane. In fact, I unsubscribed from their mailing list and then deleted the email account. Like my travel phone, that email address was a burner.

I did feel a twinge of remorse. I could have checked up on him. Hogan was kind of cute. But no, a wild-eyed agitator? A bit young, too. He wouldn’t have fit in my life. Best to just forget him.

I kept a weather eye on my credit report. When the arrest check showed up, I wrote to the credit bureaus promptly to have it removed. I’d never been to Philadelphia that weekend. It never happened. UNC’s Human Resources did indeed notice the police entry, and contacted me about it. But I showed them my dated letter asking the record be set straight. They were appeased. But that was months later.

Interesting fact: There were no official reports regarding Philadelphia. Videos were posted on social media showing violent clashes in the streets of the city, and large milling crowds in Fairmount Park. But the national news remained silent.

“Popcorn seeds!” Mangal exclaimed with a grin, as I handed him my leftover packet. “That’s a fun crop to grow. You sure you don’t want to keep these for next year?”

“Nope, I can spare them,” I assured him. “Who knows? Maybe I can spare you some of the popcorn, too. Planted like 50 of them in the front yard yesterday. I’ve got homegrown cabbage cole slaw today. You?” We were sharing lunches in his office the day after Memorial Day.

“Korma paneer and rice,” he offered. Mangal’s wife Shanti is an excellent Indian cook. Knowing that I would eat half of anything Mangal brought for lunch, she used a light hand on the spices. Mangal had a shaker of extra chili to stir into his food. I eagerly doled out some of the sweet cream-sauced korma and homemade cheese, my favorite of her repertoire.

“Did you tell your team anything yet?” Mangal asked. “About the no-demonstrations rule.”

“Not yet,” I said. “I postponed our section meeting to tomorrow, after meeting with Dan this afternoon. You?”

“Great minds think alike,” Mangal agreed. “I love this cabbage. I love this time of year. To fresh food!”

I grinned back and we clinked our water mugs.

“You’re going to do something crazy. Aren’t you,” Mangal said flatly.

“Define crazy,” I replied. “Poisoning our own air – that’s crazy. Spending our lunch hour cooped up in a cubicle when it’s gorgeous outside – that’s crazy, too.”

Mangal glanced outside without enthusiasm. Our managerial-class cubicles featured windows onto a corridor, with a view of the real windows – quite a perk. Of course, from this angle, about all you could see of the great outdoors was a swatch of sky around other skyscrapers. Taking a walk after lunch sounded nice in theory. But strolling in downtown Stamford, amid the car exhaust fumes at street level, wasn’t appetizing at all. Shrubbery in concrete pots was about it for greenery. “Mmn,” he differed, returning his attention to the cole slaw.