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As a kid, I’m pretty sure I never saw the finale of a concert or show.
My parents—let’s be real, my mom, whom I love dearly—were always in a hurry to get back to the car so we could get out of the parking garage and drive home. You know, to beat the traffic.
For the record, I am from Indianapolis and have lived here most of my life. I can personally attest to the fact that there was even less traffic in the 1990s than there is today, when rush hour consists of approximately 46.3 minutes of moderate inconvenience each morning and evening.
We also lived less than 10 miles from downtown, where a great many of these spectacles unfolded, and we didn’t go to a lot of performances because these types of things cost money, and we didn’t have much extra of that.
Despite our relative proximity to home and the scarcity of these outings, we would, like clockwork, skedaddle out of any given venue a few minutes early to find our vehicle and leave the vicinity like bank robbers after a heist.
The most memorable of these occasions was a “Disney on Ice” show at the erstwhile Market Square Arena. Quick to hightail it from our seats before the last skate of the night, we somehow managed to exit into the wrong parking garage, where my mom became convinced that our minivan—replete with its highly enticing magenta-and-dusty-rose layered paint job—had been stolen.
We canvassed every row and floor, panic rising not just because someone clearly had made off with our wheels, but because by this point, all of the normal people whose parents let them watch Cinderella take her final curtsy were also pouring into the garage to go home in their non-stolen cars.
We were never going to get back on time now. We’d skipped out early for nothing.
Thankfully for all involved, this incident predated cell phones, which meant no one was able to call the cops before we realized that perhaps there was a second garage—to which we sheepishly shuffled and found the aptly nicknamed “pink pig” parked precisely where she’d been locked and left two hours earlier.
As a nation, we are siloed in our political parking garages, frantically searching for our cars and missing the bigger picture.
We’re fixated on the latest focus group about why non-college-educated white men don’t like Democrats. We’re desperate to come up with five paths for Republicans to return to their conservative roots. We’re off to the next thing without reflecting on why we’re here in the first place.
Our nation isn’t strong because we’re all playing the same part. It’s strong because we’re all part of the same play.
The finale of our great American story isn’t a single moment or tidy conclusion. It’s the ever-evolving performance of a people bound not by sameness, but by shared purpose. It’s every voice in the limelight, every pair of hands behind the scenes and every citizen in the stands—each one essential, each one adding something only they can add.
As we head toward this Fourth of July, I hope we will remember that the fireworks of democracy don’t just light up the sky once a year. They sparkle every time we show up, speak out, listen closely and care enough to keep the whole production going. That’s the promise on which we were founded—and the one I still believe in. Even when the script gets messy, we’re better off working through the challenges
than leaving early for the parking garage.•
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Chartier is a lifelong Indianapolis resident and owner of Mass Ave Public Relations. Send comments to [email protected].
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