01:31 - 03/23/2009
Nations
I cleaned up my last post to you and added some relevant links. My favourite is the one from Nasa's JPL. I was just too nervous to finish properly yesterday. I'm sorry. I had started to vomit about five hours before my shift, you see. Finally took something medicinal, in desperation to stop it, 15 minutes before I had to catch the bus. Sometimes my body intuits negative experience before it happens. That is usually how it communicates it's message, if I don't want to hear it. As it turned out, it was the experience at the train station that was the source of the premonition - or at least that's my read on it.
You see, we meet at one specific station so that pick-up can occur. Many of our shifts are in remote, hard to reach areas. If one is transit dependent, it can mean hours of unpredictable travel over a multitude of train and bus transfers, even before beginning work. Most of us are dependent, because our wage doesn't pay enough for care and maintenance of a vehicle. It was 2 pm when I arrived at the station, although meet time was 2:30. Never trust the trains/busses to be on time. I had meant to wait in the park at that site, but a winter storm was blowing in from the north - arctic air indeed.
I started talking with one of the other senior counters about the lack of assignments. Turns out that a lot of clients are cancelling - nine last week, he said - because of the economy. More have cancelled for next week. About five minutes into our discussion, the voice started in over the public address system. No trains running in the downtown due to an "incident". Shuttle busses provided only at the entry to the core at each of three pick up points. Oh dear, that usually means a pedestrian has lost their foot-race with a train. "No", said my co-worker. "A white supremacist march is going on downtown". Oh - great. Old nightmares already retriggered by reading the "Watchmen" and "How to Break a Terrorist" were starting to play behind my eyes.
Soon after, a single police vehicle pulled up and stopped on the side of the freeway leading into downtown. Were they thinking maybe to block car traffic, as well as lowly pedestrians, from entering downtown? That's pretty serious action in this vehicle dependent/crazy city. The officers left their flashers on and headed toward the train platform. Hmmm. Now what? We didn't have to wait long to find out. A train pulling in from downtown, and suddenly the station was flooded with teens and very young adults, all in Aryan get-up - male and female - most masked. My fears were for two of our young male counters. New to the country from Asian and African homes. The one is very out-going. When he doesn't understand what is happening, he approaches someone involved to ask what is going on. He was nearing one of the clumps of demonstrators when I stepped between him and that group, shooing him back toward the waiting co-worker I had been talking with. Being a mature, white female still has some advantages in this youth-obssessed culture. I looked like most of the demonstrators' teachers would have, dressed as I was. There was still the reflex response to not confront me. My co-worker and I were both being as low key as possible about the concerns we had, but, even though the marchers quite frankly looked ludicrous in their costumes, there was still the danger of violence erupting. That was obvious from the response of some of the males in that group to our young counter. It crossed my mind that the movie industry was a bit prescient again, given the release of the "Watchmen" now.
Police were also moving in and waiting on each side of the column heading up the escalator to the opposite exit of the building. Glancing out the windows on that side of the building, chatting with some of the other transit patrons arriving unknowing, like us, we watched as the police tried to get the two school busses, obviously brought in to transport the marchers elsewhere, to move from the bus loading zone. Showed a lot of planning had gone in to the demonstration, since the busses arrived just as the marchers started flooding the station. Those two busses have a capacity of at least 55 seated persons each. I know, having ridden them on field trips with my sons' school classes. As we watched from the window, several more police cars and vans arrived. More beat cops on the bus loop, standing between transit passengers trying to board or leave the city busses and those demonstrators and their organizers. Tension in the station as another glut of marchers debarked from the next train from downtown. It looked as though there may have been a couple of those marchers arrested - or at least detained - by the police. They were escorted up the escalator and outside, while the rest of the marchers draggled through the station,slouching along sullenly. Our drivers arriving from the other side meant that we had safe havens to get to anyway. All that in half an hour. Whew.
Our driver was planning to go through downtown as the alternate route to the usual, because of two accidents that closed off two other major routes. Lucky he knows the city well enough to come up quickly with a fourth choice of travel. We still arrived late for that shift, partly because we waited for counters that may have been held up or held back from taking a train and partly because of the additional distance we had to go. Better safe than sorry though.
An office supply store, I was sent over to the electronics department on my own. Usually only the most senior counters are allowed to work there, because of the value of the product, as well as the security issues that working in a partly locked up area can present. There were two of the very senior counters with our group, so it was surprising, but pleasing for me anyway. At least the manager was showing his confidence in my skills. Before I left the main group, I was working beside two of the young adults that I trained and mentored last summer. They were discussing the white supremacist demonstration quietly. Both in high school, it was apparent that some very aggressive recruiting had been carried out prior to the march.
One of the young ones mentioning they had been told that busses had been sent as far south and near to the US/Canadian border to collect more demonstrators. Were there US youth among the group? Hard to know. The number of marchers that had been planned for, according to the young one's comments, was very disturbing. My mind racing over the bits and pieces of information I had collected trying to figure out the intent of the organizers. Obvious the young teens and young adults not realizing that those organizers were just using them as disposable cannon fodder, in a current sense, to throw at whoever they felt needed to be challenged. Very worrisome. The same techniques used to recruit nascent terrorists in countries torn by civil war.
Given the press coverage I watched and read later, it was hard to know how many there actually were. It was obvious that the seriousness of the action had been downplayed. Maybe at the police department's request? Perhaps that "show of strength/solidarity" was intended to lure more young people to "the cause" and they wanted the power of numbers taken out of the equation. When I told my youngest my tales of the day he asked me what I do to draw such experiences to me. He was livid about it, so I was glad he hadn't been with me. Confrontation is what the organizers craved to create that bond of "misunderstood youth" among those raw recruits. The dark side of disaster economics being exploited for all it's worth. Exposure of who they really are and what they represent is the only way to defuse the situation. At least that's how I see it.
Anyway I'll finish my other tales leading up to the drama yesterday in a while. They were dramatic in other senses, but I needed to record this while it was still really clear in my mind. Good night dear diary.
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