Community Organizer

They're in the room with seated reporters, he and the visiting Prime Minister.  They stand about 20 feet apart at podiums, talking about Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Iran, and he suddenly felt the jerk and upward fling inside his body,  as when he was speaking at the UN and remembered the first time he'd heard about the jerk and upward swing.  He'd been 19 or 20 then and stood watching it, listening to its sounds seeming to come from every direction, not all understandable or logical.

"Can you ride it?"
He had looked over at the stooped, gray-haired old man staring at him.  "I believe I can," he'd answered, thinking, I can take it over, make it respond to me.
"It's deceiving, dangerous," the old man said, "you can't trust it.  Standing over here on the side lines it looks quiet, peaceful, harmless to us, but the moment it feels you in the saddle it starts bucking and making wild sounds and you wish you'd never come near it, but it's too late it's got you in the saddle and you've got to ride, can't let  go.  All the time, it's thinking, 'make a few moves, find out what he's made of,'  and it makes a jerk here, a jerk there, then an upward swing.  Did you flow in it's jerk, flow in it's upward swing or did you strain against its maniacal power?  If you did the latter -- as most do -- it knows it has you, knows just what moves to make to control you.

"And the next thing you know it's no longer you and it, but only you, holding to nothing, high above it, falling, trying to grasp space with your hands, and you hit the dirt.  It's on you with all four feet, smashing you for daring to control it . . . you shouldn't have trusted it.  Every thing it does is self-serving."

Remembering the jerk-and-upward-swing warning he'd felt before referring to it at his UN speech, he glanced over at the Prime Minister.  He didn't show restraint at the UN and he wasn't going to back down now.  He turned back to the reporters:  "Excuse me, Mr. Prime Minister, for prolonging this, but this racial issue is important . . ."

A reporter murmured to another:  "To bring that up with the Prime Minister present is inappropriate and he denigrates the Office he occupies by usurping the work of a petty agitator trying to organize a community."
"Yeah," the reporter said, "it's like someone being presidential candidate, but dosen't know a damned thing about politics . . . wants to be seen and hear himself talk . . . the Office must be respected.  Race and gender be damned.  Our lives and our country are threatened by these incompetent people."