asakiyume | a strange little story

I was waiting at a park that I had gradually intuited was the place a protest against family separation had been moved to. It was about ten minutes before the protest was scheduled to begin, and not all that much was happening. There was a banner, though, with an Audre Lorde quote ("Your silence will not protect you"), and a few people hanging around, including about five very buff cyclists, clustered together on their bikes.

A woman, slightly older than me, came up to me. "Is this where the protest is?" I said I thought so and made some joke about wandering around the original location in confusion.

She nodded, moved off, and then came back, remarking that it was too bad the cyclists were in the way.

"Maybe they're here for the protest," I said.

"No, they gather here every Thursday. I told them they should leave."

She said it without rancor, as if it was normal to tell people to leave a public park.

"Oh I don't know--I think they're good. They swell the crowd," I said, trying to make light of the whole thing.

"It's a problem every Thursday," she said.

Then a friend of mine showed up, and my attention went to my friend--but next to me, I heard the woman trying her anti-cyclist gambit on another person.

"I'm a cyclist," the new person said.

"But you don't understand; this is a problem every Thursday," the anti-cyclist insisted.

Annnd.... then the the leader of the cyclist group, I guess having figured that his gang were all there, announced the route they'd be riding, and off they went. They honestly could not have been more innocuous. They weren't riding around terrorizing people. They were meeting up in a public park--and then they left! The one woman's animus was so strange!

There were some good speakers at the demonstration, and some people with very good signs. I was somewhat depressed by the turnout--it was hundreds and I'd thought there might be thousands, but maybe this just means I'm out of touch. ... Anyway, onward and upward, keep trying, etc.