Stopping Traffic – Here and There

I was out with my three-year-old, Mariana, tonight when we heard a noise that demanded her attention. “I hear music,” she told me, and indeed she did.

One of the multitude of high school marching bands in town for a gigantic “marching band competition” Wednesday had decided it needed an attentive audience. So, just after 9pm, with traffic calmed from the evening rush hour but with cars still in abundance, a pumped-up group of 16-year-old baton twirlers and drummers (glockenspiels seem to be not much of a presence in Bolivia) shut down one of the city’s major thoroughfares and started to perform.

That Mariana thought this was cool is not a real surprise (or that I did). But what was notable was how cool the stranded motorists were for the ten minutes or so that traffic piled up. It was hard to see through their windshields in the dark, but I think I even spotted a smile or two.

Well Mariana, I guess we aren’t in California.

Now, I really do love my home state. It is a lovely place with fine people and excellent Mexican and Thai food. It is also however, a place that takes cars and unobstructed driving pretty seriously. I doubt that motorists there would have taken a sudden street blockade, even one with baton twirlers, so cordially.

I remember years ago when ACTUP, the hard-edged advocacy group on behalf of AIDS treatment, experimented with messing with traffic as a way of getting public attention. That little adventure in activism included an effort one sunny rush hour to try to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge. I think it took San Francisco police about 45 seconds to swoop in and stop the blockers. At the time I thought, “Hey guys, those cops are your very best friends because if the people in the cars had gotten hold of you…”

Hell has no fury like a frustrated California commuter. Trust me on this.

Not even rock stars are allowed to interfere with the flow of autos, or at least they aren’t allowed to brag about it. If you ever see the 1980s era rock documentary about the Irish band U-2, “Rattle and Hum” there is a great scene from a surprise concert the group gave downtown by the San Francisco waterfront, along side the ugliest piece of public art in the world (folks from “the city”, you know the one). Taking note of the snarl of cars the band had created, its lead singer, Bono, climbed the hideous cream-colored beast and sprayed on it in black paint, “Rock stops traffic!” The Mayor at the time, Diane Feinstein had a hissy fit and threatened to prosecute the group for vandalism. I think a city maintenance worker fixed it with a $1 can of white spray paint.

My point is simply that here in Bolivia, people stop traffic all the time and life goes on.

Teenagers stop traffic to play the drum. A week ago the whole city of Cochabamba suspended traffic for its annual day without cars. I’d like to see that sight in any city in California with a population of half a million, even one time. Political protesters, on the left and the right, blockade whole highways.

Yeah, sometimes people get ticked off about that, even here in Bolivia. But they don’t “go postal” about it the way people surely would in most of the US. Somehow in the global scheme of things here in Bolivia, there are some things that supercede even the free flow of automobiles.

And while it is easy for me to say this since I haven’t owned a car since 1998 and walk most places – actually, I think that stopping traffic once in a while really isn’t all that bad a thing.

Especially if you are a 16-year-old with a drum, or a three-year-old fascinated by it.

Wednesday: An Apology to all Bolivian Glockenspiel Players

Readers: An addendum to my post of last night. It so happens that The Democracy Center's palatial offices in downtown Cochabamba are precisely on the route of today's 12-hour procession of marching bands through the center of the city. I can now personally attest to the fact that there are MANY glockenspiel players in Bolivia, MANY. And I would also like to add, for the record, that they all seem to play From the Halls of Montezuma very well, especially as they pass underneath my office window.

Jim Shultz