Organizers had erected the stage just west of Fourth Street, between the National Gallery of Art to the north and the National Air and Space Museum to the south. People pressed the barricades, but the crunch of the crowd only lasted until Seventh Street, which was blocked off for the day. To the west of Seventh, people had brought blankets and lawn chairs, a smattering of tents, and mostly watched the drone feed on their screens. Aerial photography estimates put the crowd size at about 105,000 people. Not bad, but keep in mind Donald Trump’s much-disputed inauguration drew at least 150,000. Comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert managed 215,000 for a joke rally in 2010. Barack Obama’s first inauguration still held the record at 1.8 million.
Concert for the Climate: No Time Left organizers had hoped for five hundred thousand and planned for as many as a million, but they were up against strong headwinds. As it was wont to do, the issue had yet again faded from the minds of the American polity. Without a major storm or, say, a city burning to the ground in the last several months, attention had moved on. The anxieties of the moment included the dead boys in Dallas and the riots put down in their wake; the refugees coming from the southern border and increasingly on ramshackle boats from the Caribbean; the right-wing militias asserting themselves in public, patrolling the Arizona borderlands and marching in Philadelphia suburbs; and the staggering price of food busting the budgets of many households.
Still, there was a general sense of comity, uplift, and hopefulness. Here we are, still plugging away, this gathering said. We’re not giving up. They danced, swigged from flasks, smoked joints and vape pens, clapped, sang, stamped their feet along to the roots-rock band Gunner Main. They filmed on their phones or through their ARs. They projected holograms of their spinning planet or wind-beaten American flags or billowing blue fire. INSTRUMENT OF PEACE read one of the largest holograms, roughly the size of a semitruck, sizzling over the heads of hundreds as raindrops cut through it. Some held aloft the boilerplates scrawled onto old-fashioned cardboard: ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE; SYSTEM CHANGE NOT CLIMATE CHANGE; YOU CANNOT ARREST AN IDEA; WE NEED LOVE NOT… and then a picture of the president. Three men of God dressed in their traditional religious garb were very proud of their banner held at waist height: A RABBI, A PRIEST, AND AN IMAM WALK INTO A BAR… TO SAVE THE EARTH! A woman wore a hot dog costume, a meme having to do with the fact that President Love supposedly ate a hot dog after killing an unarmed boy in Afghanistan. One man wearing big butterfly wings with dual images of blue fire was asked to sit because he was blocking the view. The Clean Energy Labor Coalition’s signage was everywhere as they had supplied much of the funding and workforce; the union’s slogan, NEW WORLD SOLIDARITY, was everywhere. A group of Palestinian women in wool challis headscarves held a series of signs that taken together read MUSLIMS FOR PEACE, HARMONY, THE CLIMATE, A DEMOCRATIC ISRAEL, A FREE PALESTINE, EACH OTHER, EVERYONE, EVERYTHING! Anarchists rubbed shoulders with military veterans, Quakers with Mormons, Chippewa with Wiccans. The rapper Haydukai came on for his set, wearing a keffiyeh and sunglasses with red, white, and blue LED lights, vicious, syncopated rhymes following the flow of his free hand and a beat that throbbed like a pumping vein. That cosmic dust quality of live music descended on the audience, conjuring belonging and camaraderie from absolute scratch.
VR drone cameras hovered overhead, allowing those at home to watch up close when Haydukai growled, “No time left, so it’s time to go. Time to rise up.” He knifed the air with his free hand. “We still got a weapon. That weapon is collective power. All the rage and grief you feel at our broken, disappearing world—we got only two choices. We despair or we grow a revolution. Now listen to what she got to say.”
Then he stalked off the stage with the crowd still cheering.
The other performers were confused because he was only the third act of the day. There were still nine more to go, and many of these musicians and their busybody handlers wondered why Kate Morris was taking the stage so early in the day. According to the schedule, pop star Kiki Wan was next, and this was all building to Eddie Vedder, Selena Gomez, and Elvis Costello, sharing the stage to sing “Hey Jude” in memory of Paul McCartney. Sure, the concert was free, but folks still wanted their money’s worth.
But there she was, the endlessly controversial thorn of the climate movement, who had long ago worn out her welcome in the public sphere, who many—even those who agreed with her mission—wanted to just go away, get a reality show if you must, but make sure it’s in the deep recesses of all content, on one of those worldes/feeds/channels no one knows the name of. She bounded onstage to a smattering of applause. Her hair was pulled back with a simple tie but still frizzy from the rain. She wore jeans and a weathered olive-green Carhartt she’d purchased at a Goodwill in Missoula after dropping her coat into a crevasse while rock climbing. She carried a spiral-bound notebook in one hand, clutched so that her white, chapped knuckles betrayed her nerves. There were those who would love her no matter how much dirt came out, and it was these young men and women who screamed and cheered the loudest when she took the stage. A few folks stood stonily with their arms crossed. Haydukai had taken the microphone with him, and when she reached the empty mic stand, she laughed nervously and called back behind her. A young stagehand sprinted to pop a new mic into place, and then ran off hunched over, as if this would somehow render the gaffe less visible.
“Hey there,” she said, laughing nervously into whining feedback. She tapped the mic and it went away. “How we doing today?”
“You’re not Zeden!” someone shouted.
She laughed but her fingers picked restlessly at the metal coil of the notebook.
“I just have a quick something to say, and then we’ll get back to the show.” She glanced at her notebook, and those watching at home on VR could see it shaking along with her hand. “I’ve been trying to write this speech for a year. Then I threw it all away and rewrote it last night.”
This wasn’t entirely accurate. She’d had the basic beats memorized ever since she’d dreamed of this moment while driving through the Mojave Desert beneath a herd of stars. Though she’d never told her former partner this, she admired his meticulous attention to prose. Her mind was too scattered, and because she’d fought through the embarrassment of dyslexia as a kid, she tended not to write much down. The night before the concert, she’d stayed up until four in the morning with one of her favorite books, Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, and tried not to plagiarize too much. She wished she’d had her original copy with those precious margin notes, but like that good jacket, she’d lost it years ago.
“I’ve been working on this situation for over twenty years now. Ever since I was in high school. Twenty years—man, I can’t believe how quickly time just… happens to you. I know that’s not an original thought, but it is totally shocking anyway. When I first started on this—our crisis of the biosphere and inequality and democracy—I thought, Great! Look at this huge problem someone’s left for me! I’ll just—” She whipped her free hand like she was spinning a globe. “I’ll knock this out in a couple years, no problem. I’ll give a few speeches, rile folks up, elect the right people, get the right laws passed, and we’ll all be knocking back beers at the bar in no time. I had so much energy and eagerness and just—hope! I had so much hope.”