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

was broken into, shelving collapsed. Thousands of dollars in food lay spilled and broken on the floor by looters. A car stood on its side, riddled with bullet holes. On another block, a building and police car had caught fire.
    We passed the bar where I’d grabbed a Philly cheese steak for lunch. It sported fresh plywood over a shattered plate glass window. The lights were on inside, with sounds of hammering. The restaurant owners worked into the night to repair the damage.
    I didn’t do this. Of course I had no part in any of this senseless violence. I would never do this. But my face burned with shame as though I had. I was part of this demonstration. The peaceful, civil, helpful, park-strolling part of the rally, yes, but it was a demonstration of anger nonetheless. I was horrified by the signs, not of peaceful political statement, but of outright looting and rioting.
    No wonder the Guard bottled us up in the park. They needed to control the riot out here before they dealt with the rest of us. I thought of the young Guardsman who tenderly joked with the little cancer-fighting girl I passed to him, to ride in the truck. The arrest-screening Guardsman who out-processed me. He probably worked a computer desk job like me on weekdays. The police who never said a harsher word to me than a simple, “Move along, Ma’am.” I was humbled that they could remain so civilized, knowing what havoc the rioters were wreaking out here in the streets. I felt humiliated for having been any part of this, whether I’d done anything wrong or not.
    We found the bus and hit the road back to Connecticut around 10 p.m. By then, the roads weren’t quite so clogged. I managed to nap through most of New Jersey. But threading through the potholed highways to cross New York City was a misery, even at 1 a.m. on a Sunday. The truck traffic that supplied the massive city took to the night, to bypass the holiday consumer traffic. Unable to sleep through the wailing roar of the big rigs hauling their endless containers, while the bus jounced across rough road, I stared out at the artificial lights of the largest city in America. And I considered how to follow up on this.
    I decided that the key problem I had with even a peaceful protest, was exactly who I wanted to do what. Sure, I had valid concerns. All the people at that demonstration did. But in truth, I had at least as much sympathy for the National Guard and police and the citizens of Philadelphia who were invaded. They’d done nothing to deserve it. They had no particular responsibility for solving the problems. And of course a violent protest, with rioting in the streets, did nobody any good.
    My personal hero of the day was Reese, the boathouse mechanic. He could have told us to buzz off. The boathouse was private property. He didn’t have to open its doors to us. But he did. And not only that, he persuaded the other boathouse stewards to open up and help alleviate the weird situation as well. Good people.
    If the point of the protest was to ‘be heard,’ we weren’t, at least not outside the immediate ruckus zone. The National Guard, and the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania authorities, and the civilians we inconvenienced or worse, certainly heard us loud and clear. But I’d checked in with Mangal again by phone when we boarded the bus. The general public seemed to be under a news blackout regarding the Philadelphia rout. A news blackout that my employer, UNC News, was complicit in.
    I believed in Weather Vane’s issues. Climate change wasn’t a theoretical risk in the future. It was here and now, and the situation was making me ever more nervous. Politicians mouthed platitudes about leaving a better world for our grandchildren. But I didn’t think we had generations left. In fact, I wondered if time hadn’t run out already. I’m a gardener, a walker, a swimmer, a boater. I know the plants and animals and weather of the Connecticut shore, intimately as a lover. It was hard to tell,