Adventures in Crowd Control (Part 1)

When Howard Witzer was ten years old, he bugged his mother for two weeks to get her to take him to see "Soylent Green."  He already knew the secret ingredient of the movie's eponymous product.  Everyone on the playground did.   Howard wanted to hear the line spoken so when he repeated it in front of the other kids, he'd get it right.  He also wanted to be able to recite a bunch of other lines from the movie to show them that he had gone to see "Soylent Green" and they hadn't, even though most of them had.

His mother had no objection to his seeing the movie.  It was rated PG, which was fine for a boy who had all but finished the fifth grade.  Her only condition was that he cleaned his room first.  Howard repeatedly promised to do this but never did.  He gave a number of excuses about how he wanted to but was prevented from doing so by those around him.

"Other people get in the way," he would say, spitting out the word "people" like it were some healthy vegetable he was being forced to eat.

Finally, his mother relented after he made a halfhearted attempt by shoving some of the mess under his bed.
  
They set off for a two o'clock matinee showing only to be caught in a traffic jam caused by an environmentalist sit-in at a major thoroughfare.   Horns blared and people yelled insults from car windows, but the protesters wouldn't budge.  Eventually police arrived and cleared them from the street but by that point, there was no way Howard and his mother would make it to the movie on time.

By the time they entered the theater and took their seats, the film was well under way.  Howard looked up at the screen and saw a big riot going on in the futuristic city where the non-dispersing crowd was dealt with by specialized vehicles that were half bulldozer and half dump truck that scooped them up and carried them away.

"We could have used a few of those earlier," his mother whispered in his ear.

He agreed with her before taking a moment to think about it.  No, this wouldn't do at all.  The vehicles used by the riot police stopped being effective the moment they filled up and took their human cargo to wherever it was they went.  They put nary a dent in the angry mob so by sheer numbers, the crowd would win.  The crowd always won.

Howard knew in his heart that it didn't have to be this way.  Someone would invent something that would once and for all impose law and order on unruly riffraff.  It was at that moment that he made a promise to himself, not like the one he made his mother to clean his room but one that actually meant something. He would be that inventor.  Not today, of course.  He had a movie to watch.  Besides, he was just a kid.  There was plenty of time.

Time passed.   Howard Witzer grew up, graduated high school, and earned his associate's degree in assistant management from the local community college.  He got married, got divorced,  and wound up renting a two-bedroom tract home in a modest neighborhood across the street from a high cinderblock wall that shielded him from some but not much of the noise from the freeway on the other side.

In the 35 years that elapsed, he had done nothing to fulfill his boyhood promise.  However, he had a job at the medical insurance company where he routinely denied the claims of people who would otherwise clog the waiting rooms of hospitals and clinics.  That helped to keep his dream alive.

Howard's inspiration to act ultimately came from an unlikely source, his coworker Clyde.  Clyde was only a few years Howard's junior but acted as if he were decades younger.  To Clyde, a crowd was not something to be dispersed by riot police.  It was to be surfed at an outdoor music festival.

When Clyde was not throwing himself at the mercy of unwashed masses locally, he was doing the same thing overseas.  The walls of his cubicle were adorned with photos of himself on vacations, engaging in activities like street dancing in the slums of Rio or eating boiled yak entrails in Central Asia with villagers who might have had one set of teeth between them.

Clyde was always willing to talk at length about his travels with anyone who asked.  Actually, he was willing whether anyone asked or not.  If zero or more people were listening, that was good enough for Clyde.

Howard usually made a point of ignoring his coworker's tiresome verbal travelogues but made an exception after Clyde returned from a trip to the North Pole aboard a Russian icebreaker.  He sat and listened to Clyde recount the whole trip.

Howard cared little about how the ship was built during the Cold War and converted to a tourist vessel after the fall of the Soviet Union, and even less about how global warming was making life difficult for polar bears or how globalization had impoverished the Inuits to such a degree that their children were selling Chiclets to the ship's passengers from nearby ice floes.

However, something clicked inside of Howard when Clyde described the power of the ship's bow.  Durable and unstoppable, it could smash its way through the polar ice cap.  Think what something from a similar design, on land, could do to a crowd that refused to disperse when ordered by law enforcement to do so.

"I just feel blessed," Clyde went on, "that I was able make this journey before greenhouse gases turn it all to slush.  What a sad day that will be  Don't you agree?"

Howard had stopped listening.  His full attention was now with thoughts of schematics, prototypes, a patent, and that glorious day when his invention would be put to the ultimate test.  It took three and a half decades but he was now ready to make good on his promise to succeed where "Soylent Green" had failed.