spontaneous parades, whee!

So tonight I went to an election night potluck dinner at White Clay, bringing thrice the normal amount of aloo gobhi with me (it was eaten entirely, hooray!).

A lot of THC was consumed, as was a lot of alcohol. This is important for later in the story.

Sometime around midnight, Steve Fox (who does not imbibe in the former intoxicant, btw) heard Obama jubilation coming from west of us. Shouting "Parade!", he led all 15-20 of us to the northern part of the UD campus, where we discovered a lot of people yelling and cheering and screaming.

Somehow, we wound up taking them all with us.

Over the course of the night, we wound up with somewhere between 300-600 people, all screaming at the top of their lungs, periodically stopping so that the original group of people could give speeches. Steve Fox gave a number of these as well, all very inspiring.

The solidarity was amazing; I've never seen or experienced anything like it. I do of course know that probably 90% or more of the people we somehow accumulated were only there to take part in a spontaneous parade. (I mean, seriously.. wouldn't you?)

Black of spirit and cynical as I am (I spent a good portion of the beginning of the parade thinking about how I could easily see how people get caught up in things like Nazism), though, something about tonight really warmed some as-yet-uncorroded part of my heart.

When we all started to head our separate ways, after the final speeches, the cops, who had been harassing us all night, cornered the organizers from the original group we met up with. They were wearing University of Delaware shirts and were far more obvious targets than any of us. As a group, we all converged on the cops.

"The cops would have harassed them for at least an hour or two if 200 people hadn't shown up in support," Jack said afterwards. He was probably right.

Intimidating the police.. yet another first of the night.

The really funny thing is... this all started because we were high as shit.