Civilly Disobedient (Calm Act Genesis Book 1) Read online

  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 choi
ce 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.

  Shuffling along, eventually the river of humanity broadened out into Fairmount Park, a complex greenbelt running along the pretty blue Schuylkill River. The area sported through-roads, woods, museums, sports fields, boat-houses, gardens, lawns, bike paths, and eventually a river walk. We reached a huge and elegant art museum that looked far more interesting and inviting than trudging along in a sea of cranky strangers. But riot police had grown steadily more numerous, deploying orange sawhorses to direct traffic. I tried to break out of the current, but a cop took one look at my Weather Vane T-shirt and directed me back into the stream. “Crowd control, Ma’am. Move along.”

  I might have argued, but the driveway outside the museum was filling up with National Guard transports, not museum guests. With a twinge of misgiving, I moved along.

  Chapter 3

  Interesting fact: The city of Philadelphia issued permits for only three demonstrations that Saturday of the Memorial Day weekend, for a combined maximum of 90,000 protesters. Weather Vane was one of the sanctioned rallies, and took steps to comply with their 30,000 head count limit. AARP (the American Association of Retired Persons) applied late for a permit, which was denied. Their ‘Walking Dead’ demonstrators came anyway, along with hundreds of thousands without the city’s permission to be there.

  “Let me help you!” I cried, as I caught an elderly woman who started to topple over. She didn’t look too old, maybe 75, but she was limping on a cane. One of the ‘turtles,’ as I thought of them, hastened to catch her other side. The protesters demanding student loan forgiveness eschewed T-shirts, in favor of a bandanna cap, and another bandanna tied around the left bicep. I didn’t see the point of this messaging. They reminded me of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

  “Thank you,” our charge breathed faintly. “So hot…” The temperature was nearing 100 by then.

  With difficulty, the twenty-something turtle – her name was Jewel – and I half-carried the older woman out of the crowded roadway march, over a guardrail, and sat her down among an increasing number of black-shirted senior citizens eddied out on a scrap of shady lawn. Our charge collapsed to the grass, then curled up on her side. Jewel gazed anxiously back at the march.

  “If you need to get back to someone,” I offered, “I can handle Sunbeam from here. I’m here alone.” I wished Sunbeam’s generation still remembered why they chose names like Sunbeam, and chose to wear environmental green here today instead of economic black. But the new Medicare voucher system amounted to a death sentence. I couldn’t blame them for protesting that.

  “Oh…” Jewel dithered. “No. He’s gone already anyway.”

  All three of us were out of water in our carry-along bottles by then. I collected the empties and started to head off through the trees. I’d glimpsed a water station back that way. The neighbors on the grass overheard us talking, and all held up empties begging for them to be refilled. In the end, Jewel and I accepted over 20 bottles to refill, and left Sunbeam to the care of her peers.

  “Paying off my student loans was a real bear,” I attempted sympathetically, to open a dialogue with Jewel. There was no path through this pretty stand of woods. We took turns giving each other a hand up the steep bits.

  “I’m in default,” Jewel said, deflated. “I just can’t pay the loans and buy groceries anymore.”

  “I grow vegetables,” I shared. “It helps.”

  “I could never do that,” Jewel said. “Black thumb. They should have done a better job on this march.”

  “They who?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. The organizers.”

  Jewel needed to grow a backbone, in my opinion. I smiled at her encouragingly. “Good thing we’re here, to compensate. I’m sure glad you’re carrying half the bottles, Jewel. Water is heavy.”

  “Oh. I’m not very strong.”

  “You can do it. Oh, look! We’re here.”

  The water station was mobbed. White T-shirts sporting brown fists proclaimed its sponsors were from REJ, Racial Economic Justice, pronounced ‘Rage.’ Just beyond the water crowd was a Weather Vane green canopy and enclave. I would rather have gone over there. But I dutifully joined the water lines with Jewel to discharge our mission of mercy. She didn’t talk unless I pressed her, so I let go of making the effort.

  The lines were barely moving. Off to the left, beyond some more trees, some kind of commotion was growing louder. That was worrisome.

  “Excuse me,” I cut in with the people ahead of me in line. “We’re fetching water for the elderly. They’re seriously overheated, and can’t wait this long. Let us ahead?” This dodge worked. People ahead of us started letting us jump the line.

  After a few minutes of scuffling forward, one of the organizers up front jumped up on the water truck fender to see over the crowd. “Someone needs water for first aid?” he called out.

  “Yes! Us!” I yelled, holding up a banana-hand of water bottles by their caps. “First aid water for the elderly!”

  “Make way!” he agreed. “First aid coming through!”

  So much for that line. From that point, we were done filling bottles inside of five minutes. We even picked up a trio of volunteer assistants to carry six more plastic gallon jugs.

  I jumped as someone laid a hand on my shoulder from behind. “Good work, Dee!” Hogan said warmly, my Weather Vane organizer on the bus from New Haven. “I was watching,” he confided with a grin.

  I grinned back in short-lived triumph. A sound like a gun report came from the commotion down the road. “Do you know what that’s about, Hogan?” I asked, frowning toward the noise.

  “Afraid so,” he agreed. “You can drive a motor boat, right?”

  “Sure,” I agreed, puzzled. I’d told him I was a swimmer on the bus. I earned my open-water life-saving certification to work lifeguard jobs at the public beaches as a teenager, and kept it up. It takes major swimming endurance to do open-water rescue. But I love swimming. Compared to that, boating certification was trivial.

  “Great! Come with me down to the river,” Hogan said. He turned to my clutch of volunteers. “The rest of you can handle the water mission, right? I need Dee for another project.”

  I had my doubts about Jewel, but a beefy REJ guy nodded emphatically. “I got this!” He relieved me of my spare water bottles, and they set off. I never even learned where Jewel was from. Not that I cared much. I was grateful to be relieved of my accidental AARP service. I came to Philadelphia about civil liberties and climate change, not to assist the elderly.

  A flutter of reports rang out from down the road. They were getting closer. I pointed. “Hogan, about that.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, it’s getting exciting, huh? Civil disobedience!” He pumped a fist. Several nearby water line onlookers matched him. “Yeah!”

  “Huh,” I said. “Is that gunshot?”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “We’re thinking about boat handlers down by the river. You game?” He took me by the elbow and started steering me along toward the river, away from the marchers.

  “Hogan, what’s going on down the road?” I demanded.

  “National Guard is shutting this party down,” he replied. “Especially back in the city streets. They’re pushing people into the park.” At my dark look, he insisted defensively, “We’re legal! Weather Vane has a permit. Not all these other people, though. Half a million showed up! Isn’t that awesome?”

  No, not really. Not if they’re standing between you and the exit. “Shutting it down how, Hogan?” I insisted. Another spate of shots punctuated my demand.
r />   “We think they’ll barricade us into the park for the night,” Hogan admitted. “Let people leave in controlled batches. Legal demonstrators only at first.”

  “Cool!” I said. We were legal. “So shouldn’t we…” More gunshots. Screaming. A whine like a very fat bottle-rocket, and a whumpf. Teargas, was my guess, based on the screams.

  Half a million people in the way were going to be a problem.

  Hogan threw an arm around my shoulders for a half-hug. “We need your skills down by the river. Supplies. Maybe ambulance. By water.”

  -oOo-

  Fairmount Park is lovely. Maybe someday I’ll see it on a good day. On that Saturday, I was just grateful to escape the thick of the protest march. We approached a genteel row of stately brick boat-houses. By now it was after 4:00. The worst of the heat was relenting, and a golden haze bathed the appealing riverfront. I approved of the wide bike path, nicely separated from the car road. The bustling aged interstate on the far bank wasn’t so pretty. But back to water, and civilized natural beauty, I felt like I could breathe again. For the moment, the short hill we’d just crossed abated the noise of the National Guard action on the other side. I made a beeline for a water fountain, drank my fill, and splashed my face.

  “Those boats are for sculling,” I pointed out to Hogan. Each boathouse had a rack of the delicate rowing skiffs by its side. I’d never sculled, myself. That was a placid river sport. My boating experience was in Long Island Sound, open water with waves. Though rowing was rowing, I supposed.

  “Can’t use those?” he asked.

  “Use them to do what?” I asked skeptically. The boats looked flimsy to me, and eager to flip. I wouldn’t want to attempt to carry passengers or cargo on one. Ambulance service was a definite no, and supply runs unlikely.

  “Well, never mind. I wanted you for a motorboat,” Hogan said, and drew me along to a little pier. “Can you drive these?”

  “Sure. If I have permission,” I qualified. “And if there’s someplace to go.”