Ordinary Citizens Are the ‘Sleeping Giant’ Who will Eventually Dismantle the Empire
The crowd on the Palestine rally in London’s Trafalgar Square. 11.04.23 https://socialistworker.co.uk/palestine-2023/huge-numbers-stage-protests-and-sit-ins-for-palestine-across-britain/
There was an eye opening event that happened last Tuesday in the heart of the US Empire that quashes any notion that ordinary people, like you and I, have no agency to stop this hellish madness that has arrested control of our country. I would like to share it with you and you let me know what you think.
It was around 9:40am CST, and I was running some errands before I was to meet a client at 10am about pouring a concrete pad for his above ground swimming pool. To briefly sketch some context, I live in an ordinary small town of about 25 thousand people in Mid-Western USA. In a country where lawlessness on behalf of our greed soaked leaders is common place, we go about our daily lives still minding the traffic signals, stopping at crosswalks for pedestrians, waiting behind the stopped school buses as they are loading and unloading children, and we still pull over to let emergency vehicles pass so that they can reach a person(s) in need at the other end of their journey. You know, we basically still follow the laws we were taught to follow since we were kids so that Yeats’ “Mere anarchy is [not] loosed upon the world.”
Believe it or not, in my neck of the woods common courtesy is still a thing. You still see people open a door for another at the convenience mart, even if their hands aren’t full. In this interchange it is not unusual to hear a, “Yes Ma’am” or “Yes Sir” as that’s just the way we were raised. And a “Thank you” is the common follow up from the obligee to the obliger. Many years ago this all happened with little notice. Now, in a conflictual world that has been turned upside down, people notice! This may be the only act of care they experience for the rest of their day.
In this ordinary Midwest muddy river town some of us are politically red, some blue, others somewhere in between. And some of us have long ago given up the shades of the red/blue color spectrum and sit outside the political prison that has dominated our lives over the last three quarters of a century. Even in these little micro-metros, some people have begun to realize that John Wayne is dead, Norman Rockwell painted nostalgic fantasies, the American dream was just a dream after all, and our fearless leaders do not have our best interest at heart.
Don’t get me wrong, we have our fair share of physical/sexual violence, thievery, and corruption in this town. But that was not at the forefront currently.
“The Full Treatment”- Norman Rockwell, 1940 -digital copy
So, I am sitting at one of the busier intersections of our humble burg around 9:40am waiting for the light to turn green, and I watch as a pickup truck with its tail gate down comes barreling into the intersection and makes a hard left hand turn. I, and the others awaiting their turn at the cross jaws drop as the load of new lumber that was stacked high and loose on the back of the truck comes flying out of the bed and onto the pavement at the center of intersection. The truck’s spare tire, which was sitting on top of the load, was launched over the bedside of the truck and came rolling past the front of my vehicle.
As a matter of course, I jump out of my truck and stop the tire in mid-roll and direct it back to the now stopped vehicle blocking traffic at the intersection. As I approach, the driver and passenger of the halted vehicle get out to survey the situation. The eighty something passenger was the grandmother of the fifty something driver; both were absolutely dumb struck. As I leaned the spare tire against their truck, I asked the grandmother how far they had to go and she said to Calhoun, as her eyes remained gazed at the twixty-twisted pile of wood on the pavement. Calhoun is a thirty plus mile ride from where we stood. I heard someone behind me and turned to see that a younger woman had gotten out of her car that was blocked at the intersection, and picked up one of the planks from the pile to put it in the back in the Calhouner’s truck. I was kind of surprised by this as the granddaughter was still standing in a frozen position on the other side of the truck with a bewildered look on her face. The younger women literally had to ask the granddaughter to move so that she could complete her intent?!? There had to have been at least forty people blocked at that intersection that were staring at us wondering what the hell we were going to do.
I turned to grandma shaking my head,
“Ma’am, you weren’t going to get two blocks, let alone to Calhoun, with the way that load was set on your truck. Whoever did that didn’t do you any favors.”
As I spoke with her, I noticed that another person, a middle aged male, had exited his vehicle to help re-load the truck. I started smiling.
I told grandma, as I pointed up the road,
“Once you get re-loaded, take the next right and pull over. I will meet you there. Drive slow, or you’ll drop that load again.”
Then another blocked driver got out of his car and started helping re-load the lumber, then another, and then two more! I was really smiling then. ‘This is so beautiful,’ I thought. ‘People helping each other is why we’re here.’
With all the help, the fifty planks and the tire were back on the truck within about 15 minutes, and grandma and granddaughter were slowly headed up to the next turn just like I suggested. The good and noble Samaritan helpers, half-hurried back to their cars to go about their day, as I heartily thanked them all.
The Good Samaritans of Gaza- Two men carrying a child injured during Israeli bombardment in Rafah, 12.14.23- https://truthout.org/articles/palestinian-women-and-children-dont-deserve-to-die-in-gaza-neither-do-men/
I met the couple at the next turn and directed them to the closest parking lot. The granddaughter gets out of the truck and I told her, “We got some work to do here and I’m late for an appointment so we gotta get movin’.” She looked at me like she was a bit perturbed. “What are you going to do?” she asked. Again, I shook my head,
“We have to unload all the planks out of this truck and re-stack the load with the tailgate closed. That’s the reason you lost the load, and the tie off strap they used to hold the load in place was loose. You got at least three quarters of a ton of weight here. If you want to make it all the way back to Calhoun, we gotta do this.”
She begrudgingly agreed as I started pulling the planks and the tire off the truck. I have to admit that I was somewhat confused by her resistant demeanor but, I was running behind and didn’t have time for a heart to heart discussion. She finally pitched in and we got the truck unloaded and reloaded with the tailgate up and the strap re-fastened and cinched tight with some stainless steel wire that I had in my tool box.
I was soaked with sweat. The button down dress shirt I wore for the meeting had tar smeared on it from their spare tire I was lugging around. I turned to the granddaughter and said, “You’re ready to go,” and she got back in the driver’s seat without a word. I walked to the passenger side of their truck and told grandma that they should make it to Calhoun without a problem. She gave a near emotionless “Thank you,” and they pulled off.
As I was driving to my meeting, I recalled the powerful display of spontaneous assistance that helped the Calhouners get back on the road and began smiling again.
If people spontaneously worked together to solve this issue, what prevents us from banding together to solve the larger issues that face our country today? This very real possibility scares the hell out of the moralless oligarchs who are attempting to take complete control of our lives. The fear they experience when they witness a massive display of solidarity among the ordinary populous throws them into maddening convulsions, because they know that coordinated creative energy can wield tremendous political power. Power that would dismantle their wicked networks of domination and force them to surrender the democracy that they have subverted for their own pernicious means. This “people power” as the renowned Stack author, Sobia Quazi puts it, would hold our leaders to account for the crimes they committed against us and the rest of our human family.
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Notes:
Growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s John Wayne movies were regular entertainment in our household. He had long been seated as the iconic US American macho male by this time, promoting individualism, American exceptionalism, and moral superiority. With the vantage of hindsight and a little research, Wayne is exposed as a US White Supremacist who glorifies war and served as a useful propaganda tool for the US military industrial complex. In later interviews he openly praises the colonialist genocide of Native North Americans and blamed the indigenous peoples for their own extermination as they were being selfish in not sharing their land. To make sure that Americans understood his position, in 1971 he stated, “I believe in white supremacy,” in an interview with Playboy Magazine. Sadly, he is still worshiped today as what it means to be an American. For a good review of John Wayne’s legacy, you can read Loren Kantor’s article on Medium.
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