When they fall

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Today’s news cycle has included quite a few articles (like this from WaPo) about the Trump rally that was interrupted as a couple of attendees passed out. The reports focus on the seemingly bizarre behavior of the candidate, who played deejay and “swayed and bopped” on stage for nearly 45 minutes.

I’m quite against Trump and the Republican Party this election, but I didn’t immediately smirk at this. Something that happened near me recently made me pause and consider the room, so to speak.

The other night at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room, as the Wildmans played, I noticed I was smiling, feeling happy and relaxed and delighted by the beautiful song by this young sister and brother.

But then, a woman in the back of the room suddenly yelled out, three times, and dropped to the concrete floor. People around me looked around in confusion, a man knelt beside the woman, the bartender grabbed a phone to call 911.

“Is everyone ok?” asked Aila once her song was finished.

“No,” replied a few people.

But the woman was conscious and being attended to, and people in the front weren’t quite aware of what was going on. So Aila looked at her brother, Elisha, and together they said, OK, we’ll play a song to help the mood, and they launched into a jiggy Appalachian fiddle tune. I was struck by how well they handled the disruption and used their music to lift up the mood.

But I found myself rattled, so I walked to the corner of the room and leaned against the wall. A song or two later, I returned to my spot in the middle of the floor. The woman who’d fallen was gone—I don’t know what happened to her—Aila was singing a covers of These Days and Fade Into You, and the energy of the room was back in the happy frequency.

I guess I just wanted to share my awareness of the energies and emotions that can flow through a crowd. When this incident happened, I marveled at how social we humans are. How connected we are. How quick our concern for another spreads, how swift we are to help the individual and the community.

I know who I’m voting for this election (I hope to celebrate President Harris). The people at that Trump rally don’t share a lot of my views, but for a moment some of the surely felt what I felt. That’s a connection on which we can build.