Trampled by the mob

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

When I force myself to reflect on the recent election — and American politics in general — I’m reminded of a stressful day I once spent in a German airport.

It was the summer of 2022. I had just finished studying abroad and my friend and I were navigating Europe as it was beginning to roll back its COVID-19 restrictions. Everyone was anxious to escape lockdown, and as soon as the buses, planes and trains resumed, the crowds flooded in.

We’d grown accustomed to arriving three or four hours early to airports to accommodate the traffic, but it wasn’t enough for Cologne Bonn Airport, which greeted us with three security lines of more than 700 people each. The shortest had about 15 switchbacks, while the others ran out the door and down the sidewalk.

We settled in for a long wait and got to know the group behind us — four nuclear physicists from Lebanon who, if that weren’t impressive enough, were carrying on various conversations in English, Arabic, German and Spanish.

After three hours, it became clear that almost everyone would miss their flights unless the pilots were stuck in security or the airlines decided not to fly empty planes. That’s when I felt the first push.

A woman who had been several feet behind me walked up and began to nudge me with her stroller — baby included — willing me to move so she could cut the physicists in line. Other people followed her lead and, eventually, we were swept up in a stampede of people rushing security, stepping on toes and shoving people to the ground.

My friend and I would have been lost were it not for our friendly neighborhood physicists, one of whom grabbed our shirt collars like a mamma cat and said, “Hold on, white girls.” He towed us to a safe spot flanked by potted plants while his friend left to find security.

Security came in the form of buff, bleach-blonde cops pointing semi-automatic rifles at us.

It was my first time at gunpoint, but I’d seen enough Die Hard movies to know that a man dressed head-to-toe in Kevlar holding a rifle with two holstered pistols shouting at me in German was a bad situation. The next wave of cops brought shotguns for some reason, which was somehow worse. Overall, it would have been a shockingly American way to die.

Through it all, our new friends spoke calmly, explaining the situation to the authorities and telling us not to panic. With their help, the police were able to shape everyone back into some kind of a line. Still, the panic added an extra hour to the process and, as a bonus, caused everyone to miss their flights.

The airlines, which had been waiting for the hundreds of missing passengers, took off with only the crews on board due to the security threat.

That was one of the scariest moments of my life, yet I felt the same heightened emotions — fear, incredulity, anxiety — while watching the November election. Both instances ended with the same realization: We are all in danger because of a mob’s selfish actions.

Our world has recently taken a beating from COVID-19, war, political unrest and financial instability, and the outcome of the November election was never going to fix it. That didn’t stop me from clinging to the hope that, at least, the U.S. wouldn’t vote to make things worse. Our nation, like those travelers in Germany, decided to forego rules, ignore our collective needs and risk everyone’s safety for the sake of their self-interest and, ultimately, it won’t even benefit them.

If we had chosen kindness, understanding and patience, we could have gotten on the plane.

Instead, we’re all stuck here with guns in our faces, only this time, the man with his finger on the triggers is a convicted felon. Trump wouldn’t have listened to my airport saviors — four Muslim men attending a clean energy conference. We all know what he would have done with that gun.

Our state and federal governments will continue to take away our rights and freedoms and, somehow, we must find a way to keep moving forward. When things look the worst, I hope to channel the compassion and wisdom of those random physicists. They didn’t have to help. They could have looked out for themselves, but they were forced into an impossible situation and chose to chart a safe course for us all.