November, 2016, my Dad is sitting at home on a Saturday afternoon watching football. Suddenly, the game is interrupted by a special report.
"We are in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania," the report begins, "there has been an explosion during a white supremacist rally." The report continues to reveal that the targets of the attack were a the counter-protestors. My Dad asks my Mom to text me to ask if I am OK, and a waiting game begins.
According to an article on Lehigh Valley Live, such a story could have broken. A group of white supremacists did plot a suicide bombing at a November 2016 rally of the National Socialist Movement. The plot, according to the article, was for one member of the Aryan Strike Force who had a life-threatening illness to conceal a bomb in his oxygen tank. Thankfully the plot was never carried out.
My parents would have been playing a waiting game, as that rally was the first time I "masked up" with AntiFa:
A personal highlight was when I was alerted that a prominent member of the Harrisburg Fascist Community had infiltrated our staging area. I went through the gathered, and often masked, activists warning them of this potential provocateur. He was literally left with egg on his face:
How long my parents would have had to wait would have depended on a lot of factors. The first factor was when the attack would have occurred; the main speaker was late and I actually left to go to the "Unity Rally" at Harrisburg High. It's possible that I would have been gone. I would have been able to text, "I'm fine" and likely found out about the explosion when I got home or the next day in the paper. A second factor would have been where I was relative to the bomber; during the time I was with the protestors, I was close to the barricades. If the fascists were going for maximum damage, they would have put their bomber in the center of the crowd. I may have seen, heard or felt the explosion and begun taking pictures, presuming my injuries were not too serious. I would have likely tweeted from home or the hospital letting my parents know of my injuries, etc and that I was OK. There is also the worst-case scenario that I was in the direct blast radius, and then my parents would have gotten the call no parent wants to get.
It took me a few days to parse this information. But I took two major things from this. The first is that white supremacists may have seen Trump's rhetoric during the campaign as a sign that they could come up of the shadows a bit more, less than a year later we would have Charlottesville. What they may have underestimated was that a bloc of resistance would rise up to counter them, though I saw the events of that day in Harrisburg as a sign that people were ready. The second was that resistance to the folks that Trump has empowered is risky; Charlottesville was the first large example of that, but had things gone different, it may have been Harrisburg, PA.