As the boy and the bear came down out of the forest, some guy gave them two tickets to the Trump rally, because he said he had to leave the country and couldn’t go. The rally was in about ten minutes, so they made their way over to the Memorial Coliseum and stood in line. It was an enormous line but it moved quickly even though lots of people were cutting in line and going in front of everyone else, and it was pouring down rain.
People were selling buttons and stickers and t-shirts all over the place and making an enormous racket. Some people were selling food: cotton candy, melted chocolate on bacon, and pork fritters. One guy was even selling guns, but he acted like it was illegal and hid them under his trench coat. The bear said he would have bought one, but didn’t have a trench coat, and wasn’t sure how to carry it. The boy said, no, it’s better to avoid such things, as they only bring misery upon you later, although licenses were easy enough to get, if not downright unnecessary.
People were yelling and screaming and were especially angry at anyone who looked like they might be a protester. The bear was nervous about his fur looking different from everyone else’s, so he simply bought a dozen bumper stickers or so, and plastered them all over himself so that his fur was less noticeable. Now he appeared to be a gung-ho Trump supporter, and that image was made stronger by the way he kept yelling Trump slogans like everyone else. At one point everyone was doing a salute, or a pledge, or something where they stuck their hand out straight in front of them suddenly, and the guy behind the bear clipped him and almost knocked him over. Well, this made the bear’s claws get ready to do some serious damage, but he refrained. He didn’t want people to think he was a protester. He was trying to fit in.
The boy got really mad about something Trump said. It was something about how bears couldn’t be trusted, and should have a database about them, and be given a special identification card, so they could be tracked more easily, or maybe have a big “B” branded into their foreheads. The boy thought this was specism, and became enraged.
The bear actually didn’t mind. He’d been barefoot, on the fringe of the economy for so long, what harm could come from special identification? He figured if these guys were all afraid of bears, it shouldn’t necessarily be harder for him; maybe, in fact, it would be easier. His political thinking was actually pretty murky, but he considered himself adaptable and capable of surviving a political movement which he now considered himself in the middle of. The last time he had even tried to vote, they got into a huge argument about what they meant by “address,” and he ended up scaring the voting attendants into running out onto the street outside the church where they were voting. When the police came, though, the bear had found himself up on the roof, where there were mulberries dropping from a huge tree, which he considered a bonanza. In other words, he considered politics to be lucrative and joyful, and didn’t expect any different from this rally with so many red, white and blue buttons.
~3-16, Tom Leverett
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