Just Try and Stop Me 🏀 Pax & Ellie
Two months of planning, hundreds of emails and texts, $500 in tickets and the plan was in motion. As per usual, Ellie was involved in a scheme that she and several of Harvard’s other notorious folks on the social justice list-serves had deemed absolutely necessary, despite the fact that it was, well, a bit reckless. A scheme that promised thousands of eyes to see and thousands of minds to change, as well as upwards of 30 police officers waiting on hand to stop it from happening. For years, Wells Fargo had shared banking interests with the Boston Celtics, and these days, it was also sharing it’s loans with the firm financing the Dakota Access Pipeline. Since DAPL had made significant noise in late 2016, protests had erupted around the country calling people and corporations to divest from using it’s banking services. Unfortunately, the Celtics had yet to, and Ellie and the others wanted to make sure everyone in proudly blue, Democratic stronghold Boston knew about it.
As she stood by her friends in the stands near the tunnel to the locker room, Ellie watched the clock tick down second by second, daring her to do something that the small voice in the back of her head begged her not to. Her parents were really going to enjoy posting bail for this one. Especially her Goldman Sachs employed mother. “Thirty seconds,” someone murmured. This is it, Ellie thought, pulling the ‘Divest from Wells Fargo, Divest from DAPL’ banner from her sweatshirt. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. And then, the buzzer. The loud beep sounded signaling half time, and before she knew it, El was quickly jumping over the barrier to the court, unrolling her sign. And then, unexpectedly, she was being pulled in the other direction, yanked forcefully towards the tunnel, her body unable to resist the force guiding her away from from the rest of the group. As abruptly as it started, it stopped again, and El found herself face to face with one of the last people she’d thought she’d see. “Pax?! What the fuck?!”
@itspax