speech

On the television the crowd is immense. The screen cuts away to a video, framed by the station’s brand.

It’s cheesy, filled with token photographs deep in thought and glowing testimonials. Even trite and sappy, it’s effective. It sets a tone. It’s an introduction. It builds momentum.

The screen cuts back to the massive crowd surrounding an empty podium. It’s red, rimmed with white, standing atop a circular stage, ringed with stairs. There’s a raised walkway from the podium to the entrance. The entrance is built into a large display, flanked by giant screens and Greek columns.

He walks out. The camera jumps closer. He’s smiles broadly, waving casually. He strolls confidently toward the waiting microphone. Before reaching it, he turns around in a slow circle. He waves to every corner of the stadium, seemingly to every one of the over seventy-five thousand in attendance.

On screen, he’s larger than life. His dark red tie compliments the podium, under a dark suit and white collar. It all drips of overt patriotism. He steps to the podium, smiling in every direction.

Finally, after he laughs quietly at the overwhelming elation, the crowd subsides, settling back to listen intently. He gets directly to the point, to what everyone is there for, why they’re spending their Thursday evening sitting in a stadium on a cool, clear night in Denver.

“...and to all my fellow citizens of this great nation, with profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for presidency of the United States.”

The immensity of the moment is almost palpable. Not since watching two monuments fall on television in an empty dining hall seven years previous have I watched something so historic. A black man has just accepted the candidacy of the United States of America.

The US is a country built on slavery and thriving on the exploitation of the poor. It’s a nation that was a leader in civil rights and prosperity that has fallen to a corporatist agenda. A nation where those same people are disregarded, reduced to a tally on a bar graph of economic progress.

It’s a nation that symbolizes freedom but runs as a surveillance state. The richest nation the world has ever seen has its largest gap between rich and poor since World War II. A nation that strives for equality ignores under-the-breath racist comments and ignorant stereotypes.

He’s more aggressive. He details a new direction for the country. He outlines his goals and ideas. He antagonizes his Republican opponent, attacking his being out of touch, his lack of strong judgment. He discusses how he will lead us to lift up our fellow man, united in making our country better through personal responsibility and accountability.

His record is short but filled with smart judgment and an ability to move people. He speaks to the eighty-some percent of the country that aren’t represented in media. Those that don’t fit in with the extremes of the left or right, that just want national progress and effective government. He speaks to them.

In a media climate rife with sports analogies and reflexive gossip, without the necessary contextual analysis, he is reduced to a myth. He is an idea. He is a symbol of possible change. He is the physical manifestation of the faltering American Dream.

He finishes his speech, waves to the throng, smiles wide and is joined by his wife and daughters on the bright blue stage. Likely, few of the changes he speaks of will come to fruition. The corporate interests are too strong and abundant. His resolve and policies will soften. Still, he’s a voice for change and for that, for the first time, I feel the itch of what could be optimism.

Or maybe hope.

news

He stands next to the stone wall, stoic, silent. The unmanned television camera is five or six feet away, facing him. His eyes are closed. His arms are crossed in front of his navy blazer. He holds a microphone in one hand.

The train leaves the stop and passes him quickly. He could be thinking, outlining his to-do list for the day or the remainder of the week. He could be rehearsing his piece, word by word. Maybe it’s live and he’ll only have one attempt.

There’s no one around, just him and the massive stadium behind him. The paths around it are empty. It’s cloudy and gray.

I don’t recognize him, which is to be expected. I can’t recall any local news anchors or correspondents by name and don’t watch their broadcasts. Occasionally I won’t be motivated enough to turn the channel when they come on.

They attempt to compete with cable programs and 24-hour news outlets. What’s left are hollow offerings and uninteresting stories.

Before my time, local news, whether print or television, were the main source of information. National headlines were translated into a local perspective. Deserving smaller happenings were highlighted.

Things are different. To force interest, broadcasts start with horrific events. Then the necessities like weather and sports highlights are covered before a heart-warming story. Cable news has taken over as the main television news source.

On cable, the three main news channels volley and pander and manipulate to bolster their ratings. Little attention is paid to the quality of reporting. Celebrities are covered with the same import as foreign relations. Irrational conclusions are jumped to as pundits try desperately to have a better sound-bite than another.

There is no perspective or judgment. Information is tossed at the viewer with reckless abandon. Context is ignored and consequences aren’t considered. Global events are reduced to repetitive fifteen-second clips.

Typical consumers are confounded, ignoring pressing facts that are supplied alongside trivial nonsense. Uninformed viewers rally behind ignorant and reactionary policy, leaving us hopelessly behind. Information delivered in this way is easily manipulated and manufactured.

Local news is left to fend for itself, competing with this incessant noise. It paints a violent, dark landscape. The focus is overwhelmingly negative. More people lock their doors, afraid of what lies on the other side. Neighbors don’t know each other and any sense of community is left neglected, decomposing.

The train rounds the corner and the news man disappears. I wonder what his piece is about.

offense

Every seat is full, a crowded bus, but there’s no white noise. No one—not even those who boarded together—talks to one another. The quiet is simultaneously comforting and the opposite. It’s normal. I fight the silence with music through my headphones.

In more and more places, we isolate ourselves. We don’t talk about things we’d talk about in private and find endless humor in those that talk loudly into their mobile phones about their diseases or woes. We are careful of those around us and are stunned when others don’t similarly filter themselves.

Censorship of a community isn’t handed down through mandates. It manifests itself through self-restraint. The fear of offending rules conversations, the fear of criminals rules habits and the fear of failure rules lives; silence resonates.

“Whatever you do, don’t talk,” cuts the driver.

His voice over the PA slices through my aural fog. Some around me smirk and some laugh but most shift uncomfortably in their seats, looking around or trying to ignore the comment completely.

The driver jokes a bit more. He says something about being allowed to smile, something about trying to be a good bus driver. The crowd starts to loosen up, their reactions more pronounced.

We pass under the freeway and enter downtown. The bus stops at the light beside an intercity elementary school five or six blocks from the heart of downtown. It’s four or five stories with a playground a few levels above the street.

“How many of you think it’s cheap to go here?” the driver asks over the PA. Many people shift uncomfortably or smile uneasily, most pretend not to have heard.

I wonder what he meant. It sounded inane, slightly derogatory, just something injected into the vibrating quiet. Maybe he meant the school was cheap or the education was poor but that conflicts with his tone.

At the next stop, a woman stands and walks from the back out the front. She hesitates next to the driver. She says something I can’t hear with a raised hand, pointing, obviously scolding him.

“I hope I didn’t offend anyone else. I meant it’s a school downtown so it wasn’t cheap,” he says over the PA.

He cuts the PA and talks about high-rise apartments selling for around a half-million dollars nearby, justifying his ill-worded comment to no one in particular.

macro

The engine roars under the wing, behind me out the window. The seat vibrates lightly with soothing consistency. Were it not so cramped it would be incredibly comfortable.

We ascend through the clouds and level out at tens of thousands of feet. Looking down, the clouds cover everything like a thick white quilt, down spills from hundreds of holes in its surface. The quilt reaches as far as I can see.

A summit in the distance stabs through the blanket of clouds. Further east the clouds spill over a range of mountains like frozen rapids. The mountains, standing thousands of feet, look small, insignificant. They’re jagged stones in a giant, foggy, white river.

On the other side of the mountains the clouds are scattered and thin. Through them, acres and acres of crops look like the green and beige squares and circles of an immense board game. The fields and cities cruise from one side of the window to the other quickly.

Men and women care for the fields and drive through the cities. They think much of themselves and their families. The things they do are urgent and necessary. They are important to those around them. From up here, they are indiscernible, too small to see, insignificant.

Ahead, night is falling. The plane hurtles toward the Earth’s shadow, the sun falls behind me. Directly below, tiny lights turn on and the clouds turn from white to gray to navy. The lights within the plane’s cabin grow brighter as the scene beyond the window blackens.

Up here, there is no dusk. There’s no pink at the edge of the clouds, no slow transition into night’s darkness. Instead, there is just blue to black. Day and night collide at a diagonal, only a thin line of dull gray between them.

Night wins out. The window is washed in black. Only small dots of yellow or white or red break the onyx sea. There are few dots, close together like a swarm of fireflies frozen in puddles of oil.

Those that sit behind the headlights or under the lamps are invisible, too small to see. They are just wrapping up a day filled with urgent and necessary things. Their lives are their first concern, as well as the lives of their children and loved ones.

Major highways and the parking lots of mega-shopping centers are saturated with white or yellow light. Ebony serpents flow across the land, soaking in the pale light of the moon. They are scars, darker than the dark land on their banks.

We near the metro and the giant black lake flairs like a firestorm. Everywhere is covered in yellow or white. The downtown comes into view. The skyscrapers stand like tiny torches against the night, lit at the tops and sides, clustered tightly together.

We descend and the light comes closer, brighter. The buildings grow and their illumination intensifies. Tires hit asphalt, passengers grab backpacks and bags spew out of carousals. Each person walks quickly to the doors to resume their lives; back to the lives where everything seems so significant, so urgent.

Why is it we see ourselves as so important? Is it selfishness? Ignorance? How can we be as essential as we think? Would things be different if we accepted our negligibility?

Would we go back to being more in tune with nature and stop trying to defeat it? Would we medicate less, release some self-induced pressure? Would we grow together?

Would we feel compassion for those without access to conveniences we take for granted? Would we reestablish our social conscience? Would we redefine globalization as creating a global community, not a way to bolster economic rivalries or increase the gap between ultra-rich and ultra-poor?

We toss our bags in the trunk and drive along the freeway and cross streets. Only a handful of cars have more than a driver within. Each person sits within their shell, closed off from most things around them.

As the global population increases exponentially and premium resources reach peak levels or continue to decline, why is it still so easy to insulate oneself? So easy to see oneself as isolated or unaffected or individually significant?

cabs

Over to the right, behind the car my co-workers, some other volunteers and I are washing, a crowd gathers. We’ve been cleaning cabs for almost two hours. I wipe the squeegee with the towel while the most recent airport transport starts to drive off.

The cab wash is set up in the stadium parking lot. There are four stalls in two rows, using the parking lines and cones as markers. Cabs wait at the entrance and are directed to the next available stall.

It would be more efficient to put the stalls alongside one another but the hoses won’t reach. Instead, crews have to wait while the crew in front or behind them finishes before another cab can enter. To make things worse, there is no process.

Cab drivers pull in, step out while the cabs are being cleansed, park them to the side after they’re clean and then walk to a tent to get information. They walk past two tables of food and drink for the volunteers.

Despite being composed of men and women over twenty, the washing resembles a middle-school cheerleader fundraiser. I was assigned the squeegee arbitrarily. Someone drying the top of a door smears their towel against the window I just wiped clear, leaving lint and streaks. More often than not, a tire is left dirty or the car isn’t completely rinsed.

Most of the day a man in a yellow shirt has been belting out spontaneous “let’s here it for—” and other loud bouts of encouragement. Intermittently he berates slow crews or uses a PA system. Among our crew he’s almost universally reviled.

Grown men and women having trouble with a pre-rinse, scrub, rinse, dry strategy is embarrassing while someone yells pathetic attempts at encouragement to speed things up. And now the cameras are on us and we need to rush through actual cabs to make room for the three cabs waiting for the press event.

In the other row, two of the staged cabs sit already. They’re waiting patiently as the crews for that row are off under the tent with the media cameras and the just-arrived mayor. The third cab waits to the side.

The crowd disperses, moving to the two staged cabs. The mayor enthusiastically grabs a hose like he’s been under the baking sun for hours. Two television cameras move around the crews as they clean the approved cabs. I wipe a few windows and our crew sends another cab off into the parking lot.

I see another man and the mayor playfully spray one another while rinsing the second cab in the other row. The entire scene becomes surreal.

For two hours I’ve been washing the cabs of men who drove around the city as their livelihood. Some spoke only stuttered English and wore unkempt beards, most were obviously poor. Some appreciated the free wash and others scoffed at being taken off the road during lunch hour by their dispatchers.

Now, in a pre-approved media stunt, the mayor and others are jovially prancing around cabs that were in wait for almost an hour before cameras arrived. The cabs—which already looked clean—are being soaped and rinsed by a dozen smiling faces.

I stand, staring at the scene in the row next to us. Our crew rinses another car. Soap dries on my forearm. I walk over to a co-crew member and hand her my towel and squeegee, muttering that this is where I end my day. I mention my leaving to a woman that came with me originally and she decides to come along with.

We walk past a few cabs parked to the side, their drivers in the tent getting information about a cross-city agreement. The third staged cab, a minivan shuttle, is to our left as we walk back toward the train. I turn toward it as the mayor jumps from the other side and sprays the man washing the rear fender.

I’m only here because it was deemed near-mandatory by the office and there was the promise of free pizza. I keep walking and catch the train back to the office.

I won’t watch the news and don’t know if I’ll appeared there, squeegee in hand. I imagine how the story will be broadcast and printed. The hundreds of cabs that navigate the four represented cities won’t be mentioned. That a month will pass before the reason for the cab wash materialises will be glossed over.

There will be a snapshot and short video of the mayor soaping a car or spraying some bystander with his hose. Likely, one of him crouched, hose between his legs, ready to react, with a childish look of pure glee painted on his face.