Raging Storms, Street Warfare and Power of Personal Story

I was attacked once, in a televised crowd of almost 100,000 people in the streets -- assaulted and battered on the sidewalk after a huge hometown football game in Gainesville, Florida.

Please understand I was hometown fan but no fanatic, a sober, sanguine 40-year-old mom who'd just succeeded in becoming pregnant again though I didn't show, didn't yet even know. I'd been faithfully abstaining --from alcohol, obviously not from sex!-- with the hope in mind.

So why did the attack happen to me, what did it mean?

I was on foot with my husband, leaving the stadium across the grassy field where some brash, privileged young frat boy type (wearing the same team colors as I, does that mean he was "on my side?") had parked his sporty first-tier-access car. Maybe Daddy was a big booster? Or the kid could have been a Master of the Universe himself -- it WAS the '90s.

Our team had just lost a fair --and fairly humiliating-- fight to our major in-state rival. We were the team the TV commentators loved to hate, so no one wearing orange and blue was feeling great.

But it was objectively beautiful weather (my happy hormones might have been kicking in already?) and win or lose the game, I had every reason to be enjoying it among my fellows, or so it had seemed.

Slowed by our crossing in front of his vehicle as he fumed, and apparently needing a target for his frustrations, he caught up with us around the block, stopped his car right in the middle of University Avenue's crawling traffic, and charged us on the sidewalk.

A bone broke in my hand when I was knocked to the pavement by this hulking college student, backed up by his baby-banshee girlfriend, "Patty." (I kept hearing -- in the fog of war? -- her name screamed by comrades in their car, as in "Get her, Patty!")

It quickly became theatre of the absurd when I was nearly arrested instead of my attackers as their car drove away, for what was termed "affray" by the young blonde police officer who had been directing traffic at the closest intersection.

The officer was still in braces, I remember. A kid herself but wrapped in government authority as our community "peacemaker" she held power with the iron grip that must have been her only realistic option in that crowd.

I'd lived my life thinking the cops were on my side and I on theirs, and had believed all Gators were my brethren too.

It wasn't long after this that my father died and my disillusionment with our systems of governance was complete; my midlife crisis turned out to be a lot less fun than our cultural stereotypes had led me to expect.

But back to this story -- I had yelled at our attackers to back off because they'd knocked my husband's glasses into the crowd with the first blow (he was on hands and knees groping for them under hundreds of passing feet) and then I'd tried to fight back by kicking their car. I must've known instinctively what would enrage this guy further; my years lobbying for schools honed my street-fighting impulses if not my physical arsenal.

X-rayed and bound up with tape the next business day, I called the campus vice-president for public relations (whom I had once known and worked with) and the city police, to complain that the officer refused to arrest my attacker and nearly arrested me instead. They officially advised me to drop it -- to a man, and they WERE all men -- saying she had witnesses who would vow I'd fought more fiercely than any woman they'd ever seen in a brawl.

(How significant a class that could be, I still shudder to think.)

All in all, it was a transformative moment for me, the quintessential teacher's pet and media spokesperson, grievance hearing officer and pourer of oil on troubled waters, who had never felt or struck a physical blow in my LIFE.

Personal rage and alienation caused by social injustice was a new feeling for me, and it came literally out of the blue. I was just enjoying the day and my life, with my family and friends in a place I'd felt completely comfortable, safe and loved for my whole life, when WHAM!

Call me Harbinger.
My homestate of Florida often mirrors national trends and anticipates hot buttons. Our legislative season is ending just in time for hurricane season, which will segue into football season. I'm finding it harder and harder to tell the difference.

For me, this AP news quote captures succinctly what's wrong with our too-hot-to-handle adversarial politics.

We can't go on as a nation this way -- maybe that's the true aim of the most antagonistic, that "we" won't go on as a nation at all?

Sen. Larcenia Bullard likened voucher lobbying to another emotional debate lawmakers had last year over a law -- later found unconstitutional -- they passed to let Bush order the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.

"I felt as though I was a hostage," said Bullard, D-Miami, comparing it to being between fans rooting for opposing teams on opposite sides of a sports stadium.

If you haven't read Bonfire of the Vanities, do.
Its satire may not be great art or literature
but it's a helluva weather forecast if nothing else.

And while I'm thinking of raging political storms
that make real people suffer and die, there's Tolstoy's metaphorical snowstorm in "Master and Man."

[quote=In 1998 Peter Baida]Of course, Mr. Wolfe's methods and intentions differ from Tolstoy's, as satire differs from fable. . . .
''Master and Man'' is the story of a man who lives an empty life, but sets it right in the end. ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' is the story of a man who lives an empty life, but - there is no ''but.'' Mr. Wolfe is not interested in the inner lives of his characters, except insofar as they are dominated by motives he can mock.
That's why Tolstoy's snowstorm warms the heart, whereas Tom Wolfe's bonfire chills it.[/quote]

We don't get snowstorms down here, or the West Coast's earthquakes and mudslides, but we do get sudden cyclonic assaults on reason and monster global storms that hammer humanity against the rocks.

We got the immigration firestorm of Elian Gonzales and
the storming of the judicial bastion that was Terri Schiavo. We got the yawning confidence sinkhole of hanging chads and disenfranchised felons of the 2000 election.

And one beautiful day in 1994, I was hit out of the blue sky by a perfect storm of emotions no one could have predicted or inflicted on purpose. It seems to have altered my internal climate; my politics and beliefs have stabilized on the hot-and-cold fault line.

I am both aflame and unable to stop shivering.

For all its apparent realism, Mr. Wolfe's novel is not realistic. A 650-page narrative in which it is almost impossible to find a character who experiences a generous impulse or acts out of a generous motive may be said, in fact, to defy realism.

As our new century's political storms rage on and the light is dying, we can rage, rage back against it, and against each other. We certainly have the right to live our mutual lives as satire in the streets.

But if this reviewer was right, Tolstoy offers us the more enlightened lesson of problem-solving in a storm - we might
lay freely and joyfully upon each other as individuals, without regard for class or colors as the storm rages on without, and though I myself may die in that moment, I nevertheless have it in my own personal power to choose meaning, to set the warmth of human contact aglow . . .
for good instead of evil.

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