10

The Flowing Tide

 

 

April 25, 2028

T

he guarded secret of the Neo-Publica all changed that night in April when the Prospect Park charter members gathered in a basement room in the David Hume Universalist Church. The meeting was held under the guise of a closed, church-sponsored, soul-searching, meditation, and lecture meeting—enough of a bore to keep any BlueShirt away. The low-ceilinged room was redolent in the smell of the massive amounts of morning coffee that had been consumed there, now made that more pungent by the that now popping and gurgling in the brewer. Dirty quilts, their old smell adding to the muskiness of the room, had been hung over the street-facing windows.

The church Pastor, Martin Daniels, was a sympathizer and often spoke at the Neo-Publica gatherings. Tonight, he stood by the door to graciously welcome the members as they filtered in. So far, the crowd looked unkempt and underfed like proper seditionists. Sylvia counted that twenty had shown up, as she glanced at the wall clock: 8:05 PM. The meeting had been due to start five minutes before. Aileen was making the rounds, quipping and laughing among those few seated in the folding chairs arranged in the middle of the room, and those many others who lounged about on the old, Goodwill-style couches set around the room’s perimeter.

“This is it? Just twenty?” Sylvia asked Barbara.

“They’ll be more, Syl. Those coming tonight represent chapters all around the city. Besides, these guys are revolutionaries, and Brooklynites—New Yorkers. Showing up late is part of their shtick. More’ll start wandering in at about twenty-after.”

“Back in Yale, I’d dock them a few points for showing late.”

“If these people were your students back in Yale, they would stop showing at your class if you ever did that. This is not the early aught-teens, anymore, hon.”

By 8:30, around forty more people had showed. Reverend Daniels closed the door and nodded toward the front for Barbara to begin the meeting. She placed both hands on the podium and leaned forward. “Tonight, friends, we have Sylvia Morales here.”

Some around the room exchanged confused glances and whispers. “Wasn’t she put away in some gulag, somewhere?” One of them said from where he had sunk low in a couch cushion.

I noticed Sylvia stiffen in a chill of remembrance. She probably wanted to wring the guy’s neck for providing the recollection.

“She was freed,” Barbara said.

“By who?” another said.

“By us. We freed her...the Neo-Publica,” Barbara said, prompting more exchanges of looks, and a few whispered: “Reallys?” “Anyway, as most of you should probably know, Sylvia founded the movement while she was a philosophy professor at Yale.” She conjured up a smile of recollection. “She was my teacher, and the two of us founded this Prospect Park chapter. Anyway, friends. I give you Sylvia Morales to say a few words about our protest in a few weeks.”

There was some dispirited applause as Barbara motioned Sylvia to the podium. I felt her concern from where I sat behind her as she stepped up behind the lectern. She organized her notes, then scanned the room. A couple dozen stared indolently back at her. Many of them were young, as young-looking as college freshmen out for some sort of lark. Some of them looked to be in their thirties. There were some others who looked to be in their forties and fifties.

“Hi,” she said shyly. “Uh, and welcome to this Prospect Park Neo-Publica gathering.”

“Louder!” someone shouted from the back.

“In case you haven’t heard, yet” she said more loudly, “our protest date’s been moved to Sunday, May fourteenth, and we’ll be meeting at eight-AM in the program room in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church on fifty-fifth street. We’ll start out at nine. Sorry about the late notice, but you might have heard about what happened in Chicago last weekend. So, we had to change it.”

There were some perplexed glances exchanged among the crowd.

“Anyway,” she said as she slipped on her reading glasses. She glanced at her notes, then looked back out at the audience. She lightly rolled her shoulders like a fighter going into the ring. “Once the U.S. Constitution had been hammered out in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in seventeen-eighty-seven, an inquiring woman asked Benjamin Franklin: ‘What do we have, sir, a republic or a monarchy?’ He replied: ‘A republic, madam, if you can keep it.’ With that began what Jefferson later referred to as an ‘experiment’ —the experiment of American Democracy. It was based upon freedoms brought up from a foundation of trust and truth and codified into law through the Constitution.

“Well...I believe that, in what we see now, that Great American Experiment may have failed. Failed our country. Failed us. We—or more precisely they—have not kept up the promise of the spirit that founded this republic. Franklin’s glib comment was prescient. Over the last twelve years, we have lost what had kept America great, through a workable, if not perfect, system of checks and balances. Now, that system has dissolved into a perverted aberration known as ‘Real-America.’ And there is nothing real about it—it is based on a foundation of feathers —a foundation of lies, dis-information, and alternative facts. This has got to end!” She slammed her fist down on the podium: “Now!

“In an eighteen-fifty-eight campaign speech, two years before he was to become the first Republican President, Lincoln said: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ Then went on; ‘I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.’ He was of course referring to the contrasting ideologies about slavery. But I ask here now: Who are the enslaved today?

“Fifty years before Lincoln said that, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that Americans could easily become prey to the freedoms described in Democracy. I quote from his treatise, ‘Democracy in America,’ published in eighteen-thirty-eight...” she held her notes in her trembling hands:

“‘Tyranny in democratic republics... ignores the body and goes straight for the soul.

“’...everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure.”

“He even had something to say in answer to that time-worn slogan about making America great...Again? Really?:

“‘America is great because she is good.’ de Tocqueville wrote. ‘If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.’

“And finally, this about those who have sworn a blind allegiance to the dictatorship in power, which has snuck up on us like a cat-burglar:

” ... the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint. …It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. ... they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”

I sipped my water and looked out at the attendees—some of them mesmerized.

Sylvia put her notes back down and removed her glasses. “In a broader sense, De Tocqueville has alluded those freedoms and democracy could enslave and divide us, if we don’t work for them. Today we have proof that is just what has happened. We are living it. We, the thinking, creative men and women who had hope for this Democracy, have been subjugated to a narcissist bully who runs our country like some Mafia godfather. This has got to end...” another pounding of her fist. I noticed her clenched hand was blushing deep in pain. It didn’t seem to faze her—she had found her groove.

“Now!”

There were rejoinders of “Now!” along with cheers and applause from the audience as some of them stood. “Now!”

“The teaching of American history and the thinking of those such as De Tocqueville, Jefferson, and Lincoln has been banned. The natural resources we use have been rationed. Water, some of it non-potable, is available to us for twelve hours a day. It’s especially poisonous in factory cities like Flint, Pittsburg, Wheeling, and most of New Jersey. Climate control is no longer an issue because it was allowed to get so out of hand. Just look at those beautiful sunsets over New Jersey. They aren’t natural. That’s the red, setting sunlight hitting all the particulates of pollution and smog in the air. The raw resources for heating and fuel must be mined from what’s left in the ground; coal in Eastern Kentucky and...” here she stalled and heaved a weary sigh, “and shale from mines in Alaska. All the fracking that ended two years ago has left the ground so unstable that even places that never expected them before are prone to earthquakes. Remember that six-point-two quake three years ago that nearly leveled that town outside of Tulsa? That was due to too much fracking—after Kenton’s Commissar of Natural Resources said we had to force one final drop of oil from the ground.

“Also, electric power has been rationed to eighteen hours a day; less in some places. Petroleum is now so costly that there is no point in having a car, which would be too expensive to buy anyway. This has restricted where we can go—kept us stationary as shut ins. And even if we could go anywhere, we’d be risking our lives to an unstable infrastructure of roadways. Phone service: forget it—three hours a day if you can find a land-line phone that works. It wouldn’t do much good, anyway, because the lines are all tapped. Like many of our apartments are. And the Internet—remember the Internet? —for that you need a license; an impossible-to-get-license—and a proven allegiance to the regime being run from up high in Kenton Tower. The most distressing loss of all is our pathway to information, now under regime control and surveillance. Water, gas, electricity, information; all rationed and apportioned for the good of those whom have usurped our country, who, by the way, may access all of these resources freely.“

Boos and groans around the room

She held up her hand with the missing fingers. “We have been rationed, people. Our ideals have been smothered. If they don’t like what we believe, they send us to gulags to waste away in our dreams of what might have been.” She held her hand higher and rotated it for all to see. “I can attest to that. We cannot be broken! We will not be broken!

“This has got to end! Now!”

The whole audience stood and approved. “Now! ...Now!”

Sylvia stood before them; her lips tightened in pride. She lowered her hand to calm the enthusiasm. “It’s been said that the first casualty of war is the truth. And this casualty has been openly mounting in heaps for the last twelve years. This is not the new normal, guys.! This is nothing more than Alexander Kenton’s Real-America, and we can beat it!”

More applause and cheers as people rose from their seats. “Now!” They shouted.

I noticed Sylvia’s cheeks had dampened with tears. “This has got to end...!”

“Now!” the crowd responded loudly, some with their fists raised.

It took the room five minutes to quiet down. “This regime has muzzled the press, because the press, with all its faults, also brought us a truth strong enough to flourish through some of its own surrounding weeds and petty conjectures. There was never anything ‘fake’ about it. The press is not ‘The Enemy of The People!’ The press is our link to the truth! Okay? “

Cries of agreement with a rejoinders of “Okay!’s” and one “You go , Girl!” I wasn’t quite sure, but that might have come from Aileen, who sat in the first row.

“Okay. Before I quit this podium, I’d like to read a passage from a letter, Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Washington’s son, John, in eighteen-oh-four.” she readjusted her glasses and concentrated on her notes:

"’No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.’”

She looked out at the audience and grinned “Sound familiar? The truth has been stolen from us. And we want it back! Okay?”

“Okay!”

“Good! Now show up on the fourteenth and we’ll take it to that son of a bitch in his tower!”

The room thundered with applause and “Yays!” as she made her way back to her seat next to mine. Right then I loved her so much more for the flame of her conviction. I grasped her hand and held it tight. She must have seen the tears forming in my eyes, because she grasped my hand as hard and shook it. She kissed my cheek as the audience still applauded. I think that was when I truly came to realize that there really was a cause even greater than the personal one that had blinded me to the truth.

————————————————————————-

We lay by candlelight huddled close in the narrow mattress of the pullout bed in Barbara’s den. I felt her shudder in a waft of chill through the leaky windowpanes as I listened to the pattering sizzle of the rain against them. I concentrated on the dim lights across Seventh Avenue and how the light webbed on the high panes and refracted through the runny beads of rain. Sylvia’s comments from earlier resonated in my mind like an echo in a cave. Then I worried if we would survive this resistance; at least emotionally. I knew there would be arrests at the protests, perhaps even Sylvia’s, once they realized she had emerged from hiding. Then I wondered who “they” really were. Would we be forced up against the wall of something we only thought we knew how to fight?

I felt her shiver again and nestle closer to me; fitting herself into me as though to make us one. I ran my fingertips down the naked curve of her side, feeling the smooth, and, in places, the roughened textures of her skin worn so by her ordeals. I inched my fingers back up to the smoother areas and kept them there, moving them around in a light, little circular motion. So smooth. How I had missed the feeling of a woman next to me before Sylvia reminded me that a loving touch was still possible. She had brought my senses back to life by degrees over the past four months. Through what she had said tonight, and how she made me feel, I felt completed as a person. The fire of her conviction had ignited my own.

Over the last six months, since Bill Davis had told me that he’d found out Tricia was still alive, but probably barely so, I had resigned myself that by now she had mostly likely died. Also, my fragile Emily and Steven could not have had the strength to survive two years of gulag rigors. I could only hope that Michael, always the protector, had been sent into BlueShirt training. Though his mind may have been conditioned into forgetting he ever had a family other than the esprit de corps of the BlueShirt camaraderie, at least he would still be alive.

I moved my fingers down to Sylvia’s back, and she again shuddered at my touch, though by now I knew she could sleep through a marching band clomping through the room. Leaders must sleep lightly, so she, as inspiring as her message was, I knew would always be a follower. I felt the branches of ridges and scars left by the whip upon her back, some of them hardened solid. My breath stuttered at the feel of them, and the pain she must have endured for three years. Her convictions, and those scraps of her manifesto that she must had known no one would see, must had sustained her through all the torture.

Then I noticed a filigree of discoloration on her back—a small tattoo, maybe. I lifted the candle from the bedside table and squinted to read what it was:

“There will be storms.”