Civilly Disobedient (Calm Act Genesis Book 1) Read Free Page B

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.
    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