Morning of the city-wide strike, the poet’s rosy fingers of dawn nowhere in sight, pale horizon instead a running-light sparkle of news helicopters and freighters at anchor off the port in uneasy suspension for the first time since the turn of the century.
Droves of citizens, dock workers, truck drivers, engineers, students, unemployed, reporters, physicians, small-business owners—a living blockade against massive and unchecked corporate greed. Imports at bay, swirly gurgle of money down the drain almost audible with each fleeting minute. Purchase of global awareness, in a way, given enough negative numbers on a ledger.
Civilian response to the netherworld flow of money and resources, the subaudible pulse of this impossible infinite-growth paradigm. Finally active, finally ready for something else: a new way forward. With worldwide access to information—outside of the silly but vociferous media channels of corporate spokespersonhood—the long-overdue realization of consumerism’s auto-asphyxiation fantasy.
Huge turnout, long before business hours, clusters of strangers with thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate, with loud signs and songs, with ready cameras and demands. Nonviolent bellicosity under the air of a community picnic, glad for the sun’s rise and tolerant even of the media buzzards overhead. The more the merrier.
With every hour, more and more citizens, from all walks of life, tens of thousands out in defiant demonstration of their existence as more than just demographic items, as more than mere consumer statistics; as sovereign units of something grander than profit margins or acquisitions or stock indices.
The novel idea of human consciousness not as aloof, not as heavy-handed dominators, not as a stand-alone be-all and end-all of creation; but rather just another part of the whole, just one form of awareness, just a cell within the organ of the world within the body of the universe.
Flow of people through sidewalks like the movement of blood in veins, surges with each subway time slot. Retirees, schoolkids, young professionals, artists; a constant outpour of puzzle pieces in an increasingly solid picture of humanity.
Posts
