Morris, Levine, Young, Yudong, and their fifteen most veteran organizers huddled behind the stage that second night debating if this whole thing was already over. Two years of planning a complex and dangerous nonviolent ambush, on top of the difficulty of simply planning a major concert, and the only thing they hadn’t counted on was that “We’d barely be able to summon a crowd the size of a poetry reading,” said Seth.
“The Fyre Festival of the climate crisis,” Liza added.
“It’s still early. It’s raining. People are waiting to see what will happen,” Kate assured them, but she was fending off an alarming sensation. She could take the death threats, the hate mail, the deepfake porn, the actual leaked sex video, all the vicious internet bile, but what truly got at her was this ego blow, this rebuttal of her entire thesis that she was a unique conduit for activating people’s faith in themselves. She felt stupid. The National Park Service had sent her an email explaining that she was in violation of her permit and laid out the consequences. She could go to jail for two years for the most embarrassing protest action in modern memory.
By morning, black clouds had moved in. At the sight of the dread-filled sky, hundreds more packed up and left. What was left of the patchwork crowd circulated around the National Mall pointlessly. The folks in the lockboxes had unshackled themselves when the cops appeared to lose interest. The city was busy cutting the knot of chains and dragging the overturned buses away. Everyone waited for the conclusion of this sad effort.
APRIL 4
It’s hard to say why the fourth day.
Maybe it took that long for people to pick up gear at the nearest REI. Maybe the rain letting up was key. Or maybe Morris’s speech took a few days to make its impact. Whatever the reason, twelve hundred people descended on the Mall, setting up tents and registering with organizers, who assigned them jobs in sanitation or the kitchen or construction. The next day, as the sun dried the grass and people didn’t have to hop puddles, an additional twenty-one hundred bodies arrived, an influx so large it took until midnight to process them all, get them shelter, and go over the encampment’s rules demanding nonviolence, respect, and nothing even remotely resembling a weapon. Within a week, nearly fifteen thousand people had taken up residence in the heart of D.C., with more arriving every day. The Mall transformed into a city grid. Several Indigenous action groups—including members of the Oceti Sakowin, Navajo, Choctaw Nation, Hopi, Potawatomi, and the Cree and Métis from as far away as the Northwest Territories—erected enormous tipis, bringing with them years of experience occupying and blockading. They arranged their shelters around a firepit in the shape of a buffalo horn and planted rows of the national flags of all the represented tribes. The library lent books. Folks waited in line for their turn to generate power on the bikes. Huge industrial pots cooked rice, soups, and stews around the clock to keep everyone fed. Medics provided whatever care they could, and teachers set up classes on climate science and the history of nonviolent resistance for the kids. Each night an emcee announced new activities and what had showed up in the lost and found. Donations of tents, sleeping bags, food, clothing, medical supplies, books, and solar generators were dispersed from a central distribution point on Seventh Street, and demonstrators swapped out of the frontline blockades every five hours, pushing nervous police farther back as a dense wall of people wearing masks, goggles, shields, and other improvised armor inched across Fifteenth Street and up the hill toward the Washington Monument. Crews were jackhammering apart the streets, planting even more trees in the soil below. Finally, police caught on and stopped any flatbed truck with a mature tree on it, but at this point the concert’s landscape artist, a Lakota Blue Band from North Dakota, had transformed key intersections into miniature forests. For example, Fourth Street, between the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, had been commandeered by a dense copse of maples, dogwoods, and tulip trees, like a sprite-land set for A Midsummer Night’s Dream had grown straight out of the tenderized asphalt. The crowd, for days drifting like steam, began to coalesce and, having gained power, drive an unseen engine. Police with sniper rifles watched from the rooftops.
The mayor and DHS debated what to do. They had the protestors hemmed in and there hadn’t been a single report of violence. There were also a lot of children in the crowd, as Media Relations had made sure to circulate images of kids playing in the grass, the rain, in and around the legs of police. As many as ten million people were watching on their VR sets, taking tours through the camp, communicating with occupiers, and watching the daycare, preschool, and elementary classes learn about the carbon cycle. This was a calculated risk deemed vital by Morris, Young, and Yudong: to encourage people to bring and keep their children there. It gave authorities, especially the mayor, pause. This situation had to be resolved peacefully. These were not alt-right lunatics in Viking gear storming the Capitol Rotunda. There were kids in reading circles by day and folk singers crooning onstage at night. “It would be better if they were rioting,” the mayor grumbled to an aide.
In a holo-conference, President Love remained utterly unconcerned. He had bigger fish to fry (like China’s increasingly unhinged president; like the AWOL Mars mission), and cute actions like this tended to burn themselves out. Forging his political career through the Democratic Party, he had particular disdain for lefty agitators who couldn’t organize a barbecue. Let their trash pile up and the porta-pots overflow. He would finish his Asia tour, and if they were still there by the time he got back, he’d start choking them out with vomit gas.
Logan Dougall came from North Carolina, where he’d lived for two years on an anarchist commune scavenging his own food and stitching old clothing back together, no plumbing or electricity. When he hitchhiked into town for provisions, the driver told him what was happening in D.C. He decided he was sick of the commune anyway and kept on hitching north. Bridget Zeckhauser bought a ticket out of Juneau, Alaska, where she’d spent a decade studying the fate of the northern sea otter. She’d been drowning in a lot of despair lately, and when she saw Morris take the stage for that speech, she had a real “Fuck it” moment, packed her sleeping bag and tent and was in D.C. eighteen hours later. Walt Pasquina’s younger sister refused to leave. They argued about it for a day and a night, but she was not only smarter than him, he realized, but way more stubborn. He called their parents and told them what the deal was, Kelly was being a pain. “She was born a pain,” their mom said, totally unsurprised that her daughter wanted to get herself fully wrapped up in all this. Walt told his mom he’d stay and at least make sure Kelly was safe and things remained orderly and peaceful.
The Clean Energy Labor Coalition, much of its leadership under investigation, racketeering charges in the works, had to cling to the right side of the law, even as many of its members, educated in the strike and agitation, saw the D.C. action and began to deliver cash, supplies, and bodies. CELC members formed the bulk of the construction crews and got to work dealing with what organizers knew would be the key issue: waste disposal. Bathrooms in nearby buildings were quickly seized and treated as the occupation’s most vital treasure; the sanitation team cleaned the portable toilets and showers every hour, the refuse pumped into either nearby sewers or sanitation trucks, trash minimized, collected, recycled, and repurposed whenever possible.
Morris opened a line of communication with the mayor’s office to assure the city that the occupation would do everything it could to keep the crowd nonviolent and nondestructive. They would police their own. Would-be looters, provocateurs, and other troublemakers would be expelled by the Blue Bands. Though everyone is welcome, it is a privilege to be a part of this, the AI warned any incoming insurrectionists. The rule of law will prevail within these new borders of freedom. In other words, don’t smash a Starbucks window, jackass, or you will be forced to leave. Like Gandhi’s satyagrahas, the Blue Bands formed the point of the spear for an army of warriors whose strength was not to fight. They brought a militarized discipline to the operation. Though she often talked the talk, Kate Morris had no patience for horizontal structures or autonomous self-organization. Leaderlessness was for the birds. She only intended to offer people the fiction that they were in the arms of an organic movement. But she needed more enforcers, so her people found a kid named Dougall from North Carolina, a sea otter scientist all the way from Alaska, and a Marine from Maryland. After brief interviews and background checks, she offered them blue armbands with tracking chips sewn into the fabric.