Politics and Parkour

Week 22: Written June 2, 2016

Jolene needed a stick.

She had her poster board ready — the message scrawled in thick, red paint — but she needed a wooden stick to hold it up, to hoist it in the air. She wouldn’t be a part of it otherwise.

“I don’t think you should go,” her mother said from the doorway. “It’s not safe.”

“Mom!” Jolene was tired of hearing it. Nora was going. So was Alex. She’d missed the last rally, but she wasn’t going to miss this one, too. She just needed a stick.

Her mother puffed her cigarette frantically, crossing her arms. “I don’t know.”

Jolene groaned. She bent her desk chair over and kicked the wooden leg. It broke free and she smiled.

“They’re saying on the news it might get cancelled anyway. You’re better off staying home.”

Jolene pulled a couple strips of packaging tape and attached the leg to her poster board. All finished. She was ready to go.

“I’ll be back in a few hours,” Jolene sad, holding the sign under her arm and walking out the door.

“Be careful,” her mother said, but Jolene was already gone.

The train was filled with others just like her, carrying homemade signs and trembling with excitement. They spoke loudly to one another, all part of the same movement. It was a revolution.

They strode together down the city streets, large packs of them, towards the park where the rally was happening. They looked both ways at each intersection — not for cars, but for opponents. The people on the other side were equally impassioned, and known for making a scene. The potential for violence was high, and a lot of people liked it that way.

Jolene just rolled with the current.

She told her friends to meet her at the entrance to the park, but in hindsight, that seemed like a bad idea. There were crowds converging there, both supporters and detractors, and by the time Jolene arrived, it was nothing but a sea of people. And everybody looked alike, everybody screaming, shoving, stomping. She gripped her sign tightly. She might need it as a weapon.

She could hear the rally starting, lots of cheering and clapping. But also yelling, too. A fight had broken out close by, and suddenly, the horde in which she was trapped turned swiftly, and viciously, right.

It was like being on a roller coaster, having no control, as the herd of people moved as one. They held their signs high, like flags on the battlefield, yelling things at each other that they wouldn’t have had the balls to say on their own. There was power in the mass.

Jolene yelled, too. She wanted to be a part of it, and she swung her sign like a sword when she spied an enemy nearby. She felt the wooden stick make contact, and saw the protester recoil in pain. It felt good, so she did it again. And again.

Looking out on the crowd, it looked to Jolene like a giant wave crashing on the beach, arms and bodies waving and falling in perpetuity. She felt herself losing her balance, the force of the wave knocking her down. She jumped up, scared, and found herself standing on a post on the perimeter of the park.

It was a massacre.

There were supporters, protesters, and cops fighting each other in all directions. There were gunshots and fires.

She needed to get out.

She dropped her signed and leapt for the next closest cement post. She smacked a man in the head midflight, but she didn’t care. There was no time to care. She just needed to make it back to the street, and back to the train station.

But people kept coming. She couldn’t believe the number of people. They came from everywhere, like a flood, all of them so ferocious that she couldn’t tell one side from the other. All she saw was anger, everywhere anger.

The next post was too far to reach. She couldn’t jump. But the crowd was slowing down, so she did something crazy; she stepped on someone’s shoulders, and then another person’s back, crossing the sea of insanity one body at a time. They hardly seemed to notice, though, as they were too focused on the melee ahead of them.

When she reached the park entrance, she jumped back down and squeezed through the crowd like a snake, weaving and winding her way back to the street. For a while, it felt futile, impossible, the crowd neverending. Then the bodies parted, and for the first time, Jolene felt mercifully alone, catching her breath on a median in the middle of the boulevard.

She looked back over her shoulder. The brawl was only getting worse, so she turned and ran, no longer concerned with how it ended.

When she got home, her mother was watching the news. Both candidates were on TV, denouncing the events of the evening and calling for unity. But Jolene was no longer sure such a thing existed.