This Is Rebellion
WITH A POCKETFUL of superglue, anything is possible. I am sitting with my partner, Mark, in the middle of the road outside Parliament, facing a line of police, the full moon shining over Westminster Abbey. For the amusement of rebels, someone tows a sound system in a trolley around Parliament Square. The police have just put in a request to the DJ to play “Thriller,” and there is a sinuous wave of dancing around a grandmother in a wheelchair, who is here because she is trying to get arrested.
Superglue is good for bonding, superb for attachment. Mark and I have a bonding moment, courtesy of a few squirts from the tube, and we hold hands tightly, stuck fast. “We’re literally handfasted,” I laugh. For me, it is the second sweetest moment of this sweet rebellion.
We are part of Extinction Rebellion, aiming to block the streets of central London. We are rebels, gluing ourselves to almost anything so it is harder for the police to remove us. People are glued to the headquarters of an oil company, glued to the stock exchange, glued to asphalt of the streets. Like Antaeus with superglue, we gain our strength from ceaseless contact with this good Earth. Love and holding fast to the ground we stand on, laying our bodies down as roadblocks, using anything—a boat, an open-sided lorry—as an impromptu stage in the middle of the streets, the rebellion is designed to block business as usual, because what passes for normal is not normal and cannot continue. The very laws of physics preclude it. So whereas the juggernaut of our current way of life is bearing down on us, Extinction Rebellion (XR for short) will stand in its way.
The Houses of Parliament are shrouded in gray veils. This is for practical reasons, for repair work, but it has a symbolic aptness: this occluded ghost speaks of a political system that is moribund. Rebels are using the shroud as a screen to project David Attenborough’s film A Life on Our Planet. As Mark and I hold hands — firmly—the film shows a father and son driving through wildfires in California, the vehicle seemingly about to explode with heat, flames leaping at them. The film’s message is ours: we are taking a road that leads to hell; we have to stop and turn back.
On the first day of the rebellion, some ten thousand rebels, nervous and expectant, gather on pavement and street corners, at various prearranged sites from Oxford Circus to Waterloo Bridge, Marble Arch to Parliament Square. At a minute before the symbolic eleventh hour, a man passes softly through the crowd. “In two minutes,” he whispers, “be ready to go.” As the pedestrian lights turn green, we surge onto the streets and
