Betsy Robinson's Blog - Posts Tagged "protest"

On walkers and canes they shuffled, in wheelchairs pushed by their children and grandchildren they rode, flanking a multitude of Boomers who'd made a lifestyle of youth and piloted the protesters on motorized scooters. "People get ready . . ." sang the young people who had used their smart phones to organize the buses and convoys. From all over the country they flooded the streets of DC, finally so tightly packed against the reinforced spear-topped White House fences that the old people crashed through.

But neither broken hips nor the Orange Man brigades could quell the swell of outraged pensioners at a missed payment of their hard-earned Social Security.

They hobbled, they limped, they slow-motion surged from the Ellipse onto the White House lawn and into the Kennedy Rose Garden which no longer had flowers since the woman the Orange Man doesn't sleep with replaced them with concrete. They filled the East Lawn, the West Lawn, and the South Lawn, where several elderly women were heard to exclaim, "I found a rotten Easter egg."

"I don't suppose we could eat them," replied another, miffed at the cost of her breakfast since the inauguration.

David Hogg, the new vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and former Parkland School gun control activist, rolled his meemaw to the quickly erected podium and lowered the microphone to her chin.

"I have one thing to say," she bellowed over the electronic squeal.

"All right, all right there, young lady," came a gruff but hopeful voice over an invisible sound system.

"Bernie Sanders!" laughed David Hogg's meemaw. "Take it away, Bernie!"

And as David carefully rolled his grandmother down the portable ramp that had been hastily but expertly invented for quick assembly by a gaggle of MIT students who understood the future and wanted to do their part, Bernie took the stage.

"Welcome! Welcome to everyone! We are the richest country in the world. You have all worked hard for your retirement income! And finally, finally, it seems we have an issue that brings us all together.

"Just for a moment here, let's hear from you. Tell us where you came from, and if you don't mind, your political affiliation.

"You there, yes you in the lovely blue muumuu with the nice pageboy hairdo—reminds me of my mom in Brooklyn, always did her hair nice. Yes, tell us, where are you from and anything else you care to share."

"My name's Estelle. I'm from Michigan, and I voted for Trump—"

As the boos erupted, Bernie raised his hands like Moses. "Everybody, everybody is welcome here. Excuse me, excuse me one moment, Estelle, I think we need to establish our commonality." And instantly a respectful calm was restored.

"It is a big country," continued Bernie, "and people come with all different issues. But here and now—this is a place to come together for our common good, so there will be no booing." And as a mumble of apology undulated through the crowd, "All right, Estelle, go on. Tell us what brought you."

"I was a librarian for 50 years—"

"Wonderful, wonderful," mumbled Bernie. "Never mess with librarians. Go on, Estelle."

"I'm ashamed of my vote. You'd think I'd have realized—"

All around her, old people cooed and comforted with several on either side of her caressing her arms.

"Thank you, thank you," whimpered Estelle, her limpid blue eyes filling with tears behind her thick lenses. "I never made a lot of money, but I never spent a lot either. I was smart, so I thought with my Social Security I'd be all right. But now— Now—" Unable to go on, she collapsed in tears.

"All right, all right, we understand, Estelle. We're so glad you're here. Who's next?"

A tall bald Black man way in the back raised his hand, and Bernie shouted for him to speak.

"I'm from Tennessee and I only voted for Trump because of RFK, Jr., but now I realize that a guy with an oil and gas family trust fund don't know nothing about living on Social Security. I heard he mixed it up with anti-social obscurity due to malnutrition and food deserts."

"Yes! Yes!" bellowed the crowd.

"Next," said Bernie, pointing. "You there in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank. Can we get some help here? Somebody hand her a microphone."

"Thank you, thank you," gasped the woman. "I appreciate— I've got COPD—"

"Take your time, take your time, dear," comforted Bernie. "We're here for the long haul. Give her some space, people."

The woman coughed, cleared her throat, and then spoke in a voice that belied her medical appliances: "My name is Maria. I'm a Mexican American, a citizen of this country for 60 years, and I'm living in a nursing home in Southern California—"

"Bless you," mumbled Bernie.

"Bless you, bless you," echoed the crowd.

"I thought the wildfires would do me in, but thank God they didn't touch us."

"Thank God," said Bernie.

"Thank God, thank God," echoed the crowd.

"I'm so glad you made it," said Bernie soberly. "What brings you here today, Maria?"

"Well, this may sound silly—"

"Nothing is silly," said Bernie. "Take your time. Tell us."

"Well, I was brought up to believe the Golden Rule. All my life I tried to do the right thing. I paid my taxes, helped my neighbors, and volunteered at my children's school. Two of them served in the military and died in Iraq."

"I'm so sorry," said Bernie. "Thank you for their service."

"Thank you, thank you," echoed the crowd.

"And the other one, well he died of AIDS in 1982."

"Aw, gee," said Bernie, wiping his brow and shaking his head with sorrow, and a wave of sympathy rolled through the assembly.

"I was about as mad as a mother can be at Reagan for never even mentioning the crisis. But at least he didn't try to make it worse.

"But this—" she gestured toward the White House, "This is much worse. I'm a Christian, and like I said, I believe in the Golden Rule, but also there's the 'eye for an eye,' which the Orange Man said is his favorite Bible passage. So I think it's time we did unto this regime as they have done unto us."

A murmur of confused delight began to reverberate across the White House lawn, spreading quickly back to Pennsylvania Avenue, then to 17th and 15th Streets on the west and east and as far as H Street and Constitution Avenue on the north and south as Maria's voice resounded through the sound system.

"What are you saying, Maria?" queried Bernie, a slight smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

"Shut them down!" boomed Maria in a voice that came from a place beyond her oxygen-deprived lungs. "No tax payments, no food deliveries, I call on all White House service personnel to walk out now! No cleaning people, no butlers, no maids. Walk out! Walk out!"

And miraculously, an explosion of uniformed workers—cooks in aprons, chauffeurs in hats, doormen, even many office workers in business clothes—hearing Maria's cry, exploded out of the White House.

"No traffic, no commerce, no communication! Many of us are already sitting, so we don't even have to move."

"You mean …?" said Bernie, now with a full-face grin.

"Yes!" declared Maria. "A sit-in. Nobody move for as long as it takes. My grandson, Jesus, brought me here, and he and his friends from colleges around the country brought tents and supplies—"

And as if ascending out of an ocean, battalions of young men and women rose with backpacks and duffle bags bursting with food, medications, books and magazines, and even solar-powered appliances for cooking, entertainment, and medical sterilization.

And as the 70 million pensioners and their supporters heaved themselves to the ground, at a window somewhere in the White House private residence, a big bloated blob of a man with tiny hands and a decompensating brain, peeked out the window and muttered, "Wow, what a crowd size. They love me. They really really love me."

I'm 74 and all my life I've been a late bloomer.

When I was an actor in my twenties, a roommate advised me to do my own thing since I was already writing my own audition monologues. It was the time when performance art was exploding in downtown Manhattan. Singers were singing, actors like Whoopie Goldberg were creating their own material: finding a way to work when there was no work.

But I wanted to jump through commercial hoops. After 10+ years of leaping, my final swan song was writing and performing a one-woman (me) play called Darleen Dances to much acclaim for two workshop audiences and subsequently having the opening monologue published in a popular actors' monologue book and being performed so often that it's on a "do not do" list for university auditions. But no commercial production or work of any paying kind followed, so I got off the dead-end show-biz road.

For years I've worked as a journalist and editor while I've written novels. Some have won awards and been published by small presses. But the last two were languishing, unread despite a good-hearted agent's submissions.

Why?

Because I'm not famous, I don't have a big sales record on Bookscan, and … Who know? I don't really care.

But as the 2024 election approached, my whole being went into alarm with thoughts of "Time's up!" My psychic voice was screaming that no matter how big Kamala's crowds, a blood bath was encroaching. And I had something to say about dealing with it in the second of my two languishing novels, The Spectators.

So I started Kano Press and published it two months before the debacle erupted.

What did I want to say so badly?

The Spectators is a novel about our herd nature and dealing with it as a person who prefers to think independently and observe. And my epiphany when I got to the end of my story was that it is not an option to divorce the herd. We can tell ourselves we are independent, but that is a lie. As goes the herd, no matter how we resist, we will go as well.

And since you cannot control anybody else in the herd, all you can do is try to find an inner truth and live by it. Doing that is by no means a passive action—witness Cory Booker's marathon. But acting with an impermeable sense of truth is like Zen Master fighting. You do battle in a relaxed, energized state, knowing exactly who you are and why you are playing your part.

Part love letter to NYC’s Upper West Side, part an ode to friendship between a writer and her creations (reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to Paul Simon to terrorists), The Spectators’ cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.

Discount ($10 in the USA only) paperbacks here: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?jp...

E-books are sold everywhere you can buy books (even on Bookshop.org).

And here’s a short reading:
https://youtu.be/4GOZTPxQ6H8