It was 52 degrees in Richardson, Texas when Laura Sanchez walked out to her car early Monday morning, January 25, 2017. The sun wasn't up yet; the street lights were still on; the ground smelled rich, the dew-damp fallen leaves sticking to the edges of the walkway. Not much could be heard other than the beep of her car when she clicked her key to unlock it. A distant dog barked and there was the muffled sound of traffic on the corner of Coit and Arapaho beyond brick walls surrounding the secluded subdivision that turned in on itself, away from the noise and commerce, away from the hectic life out there. Under these trees, the hushed morning seemed to breathe. The damp air spoke to her. She felt alive. She was ready for the 34 mile commute to Arlington, where she was a first-year architecture major at UTA.
She got into her little white Ford Fiesta and turned the key. NPR's Morning Edition was on the radio. There was a story by Amy Sisk about the continued protests over the Dakota pipeline. She pulled out into Comanche Lane and drove down the narrow suburban street lined with cars on both sides and made her way towards Mimosa, ready for this gray-dawn day. Her posture showed it. She leaned slightly forward in her seat, both hands gripping the steering wheel. She looked in the rear-view mirror. Though it was still relatively dark, she saw her long, black, slightly crimped hair, and bright red LOVE ear rings dangling from each ear. She liked them. They were modeled after Robert Indiana's famous sculpture, and she'd purchased them at the DMA, her home away from home. She slowed to a stop at Mimosa and took a right. As she turned the corner, she could see the traffic on Arapaho ahead. Most people her age made fun of the suburbs and wanted to move towards downtown. But she understood them. Yes, the brick walls that lined the main roads--Campbell, Arapaho, Beltline--were ugly (especially when they started to lean with time), as were the shopping centers at each major intersection. But, the quiet, narrow, curving tree-lined streets in the subdivisions themselves offered a reprieve from all the noise. They're almost like little Japanese botanical gardens, she thought.
And then Arapaho was there. She took a right to Coit, which she would follow down to Central Expressway.
Morning Edition continued:
This pipeline has really become ground zero for the environmental movement. Big environmental groups like 350.org have gotten involved and they hope to interrupt the transportation of fossil fuels. The hope is that if fuel can't get to market, it won't be extracted anymore. Many environmentalists are vowing to fight in the streets and the courts, and essentially take the level of this protest to new heights.
"That's not it!" she said, as she slammed the steering wheel. "We're not so stupid as to think we don't need oil." She moved over to the left lane. It's the balance, she thought. There's no freaking balance. Laura Sanchez believed in balance. That's why she'd become an architecture major. Cities were an ugly, necessary evil, but it was possible to balance that evil with good architecture and good city planning--to bring the serenity of nature in through pleasing forms and greenery. The nation was out of whack. Big business and right wing lunatics were in control of everything. She wasn't anti-business; she wasn't anti-religion. Neither were most of those protesters. The hope was not to cripple the oil industry. The hope was to stop a pipeline. The hope was to help a tribe. The hope was to protect a river. Then perhaps another. But when the media reported things that way, it made it seem the protesters were seeking something unreasonable. Why is a clean river something unreasonable? Why is it unreasonable to have some say as to whether or not a pipeline goes across ground sacred to your people? And even though they weren't her people, she got that. Why couldn't others? Every argument was framed as if there were no middle ground, or with the status-quo being framed as the middle ground, no matter how awful it was. So, if you wanted to stop something ugly or do something good, you were a radical no matter how reasonable your request was. And I'm listening to NPR, she thought. What if I were watching Fox?
She was a couple blocks further down Coit when traffic came to a standstill at Roundrock. That was odd. Usually traffic didn't start backing up until Spring Valley. Still, she braked and waited patiently. She'd left twenty minutes early. Her one drawing professor was a punctuality fanatic, and he'd fail you if you were tardy more than three times, and 30 seconds late was considered tardy. The odd thing is, although he could draw with precision quality (which is why the school of architecture hired him), he was best known for abstract paintings not too unlike those of Jackson Pollock. She thought it odd that someone with such loose brush-strokes was such an uptight jackass.
As she waited, she looked at the ugly black block Congress Bank Tower on the left. A few office lights were on. Big, bright white bulbs followed the vertical concrete columns down, which would make it look less squaty if the idiotic architect had not run horizontal black panels between the windows which countered any height achieved by the vertical columns of concrete. So typical. She wondered what happened to most designers between school and their career. Her peers were good designers. That must have been true of the classes before her too. Yet, there was so much ugliness around her. At some point most everyone must simply sell out.
Slowly, as the traffic moved forward again, her thoughts subsided and NPR filtered in through the voice in her head like light penetrating the forest floor with the shifting of leaves. She realized it was no longer the same story. There was clapping and a man said something in Dutch. A female voice on NPR translated:
In the Netherlands, do you want more or fewer Moroccans?
The NPR reporter continued, "fewer," the crowd chanted.
As Laura listened, she slowly realized that the story was on a right-wing politician gathering momentum in the Netherlands.
A man was saying, "This reputation we always have of ourselves as a very moderate and tolerant and accepting country is only skin-deep. His rise shows that there are many people out there that have very different ideas about how the Netherlands should be."
Laura worried deeply. White nationalists seemed to be getting the upper-hand everywhere. She didn't know a terrible amount of history, but she knew enough to recognize patterns similar to the rise of World War II. Only this time, it seemed the United States was part of the insanity, if not the leader of it. How could she not worry? Her last name was Sanchez? Sure, she was a second generation American Citizen; her dad was an important small manufacture of product labels; but did things like that matter in Nazi Germany? Once intolerance was on the rise, laws were just changed so the evil people in the world could do their evil legally. The country just redefines what it means to be a citizen. It all goes back to balance, she thought. There is no freaking balance.
Sometimes she wondered if anything mattered anymore. She didn't like that thought. She hated it. Her parents had taught her to set goals, to follow her dreams, which is what she was doing. Yet, the thought would creep in every now and then: What for? There is no sensible way to gauge what tomorrow will bring. Why work? Why plan? Why dream?
She slammed the steering wheel again. "Because of balance," she said aloud. Some thoughts have to balance other thoughts. God needs energy on his side. "I will be part of that energy."
She turned off the radio. She'd had enough of the world for one day. She plugged in her I-phone and selected her favorite play list, World Beats II. This would be her stand at this moment for inclusiveness, no matter how inept it was. She scrolled down her playlist to the Moroccan artist Somadina, glancing up now and then to the brake lights in front of her. She was in her groove. Up yours, whatever fascist you are, she said in her head to an ethnocentric politician in the Netherlands now silenced by her choice not to listen to his bullshit.
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