Yesterday afternoon, while I was working on some signs, I received a call from the Barrett campaign. They were making public a promotional video that was shot last week with the Overpass Light Brigade. It is a really great piece. Please recommend, share, like, and spread it. Help us get the word out! By highlighting us, Tom Barrett is embracing the whole grassroots genesis of this movement. It is an important, and earnest, symbolic action.
Yesterday evening, sixty-three people showed up for another Bridge Party. The location call was put out yesterday morning. Sixty-three activists, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, union members, people not in unions, teachers, ironworkers, students, carpenters, information technologists, automobile repairers, concerned citizens working the GOTV trail by day and coming to stand on an overpass by night. This creative intervention that began on November 15th with an idea and some LED lights has grown into an intense, sweet and hopeful mediagenic spectacle. Forty-one bridges ago it was hard to find 10 people to brave the lonely freezing highways. Now we get 63 people on 24 hours notice as we hold aloft our physical tweets.
As our evening action came to an end our expert bagpiper puffed up the pipes. The low drone began like a backwind breath and harmolodic tones captured the night. Even the air horns below were rendered insignificant as he led the Holders off the bridge. We always line up for a final photoshoot, so that the neighbors can see and be part of the action. It is a complex thing to compose 63 people in the high grass of a road shoulder, lined up on a curb and holding signs aloft. At that very moment, a policeman drove up in a wagon. The bagpipes deflated with the squawnks of dying geese, and our piper hid his instrument like a third leg, and walked over by me. He's been arrested before for disturbing the peace. The cop got out, and of course, his first question was "Do you have a permit for this?" A First Amendment lawyer who happens to be part of our loose affiliation of volunteers walked over to talk with the policeman. The Holders held forth, and a phalanx of people's paparazzi stood across from them, snapping pictures.
I had one of those strange moments. I just started to laugh. It was so damned funny! What was he going to do - send us back to the bridge where we belonged? Finally, it was all fine. We did our "zombie walk" across the street, with badscience directing them to "look alive, zombies!" since the policeman was right there in the van, and 63 people were jay-walking like staggering drunks. It was so funny! I might say here that "you had to be there" but I think not. You, my dear Kossacks, have "been there" all along the way. Your support and encouragement and comments and intelligence has been a light in the darkness of these past 16 months. I am infinitely grateful.
I have a few new letters to make today. We go out tonight, for GOTV in the Hood, and another bridge action. Tomorrow we go to Madison to be at the heart of the start. After that, we look forward to a chance to regroup, weed the garden, take some walks, maybe kayak a little in Lake Michigan. But OLB will continue. We are dedicated to creative resistance and tactics of visibility to help push real progressivism forward in our beloved state.