A strange thing happened last night when we went to see the fireworks.
A Swarm.
I never heard this term before. We were seeing fireworks with my friends family at the University of Buffalo campus. We had attended several times before. But this time a large crowd of people began to form in a park below us. A few dozen turned into a few hundred, and then a thousand.
It was mostly college students, mostly male and this crowd was drawing more in like gravity.
We heard a cop behind us say into his radio, "This does not look good." Slowly more police began to arrive by bicycle, on foot, in golf carts and cars.
Their tone turned alarming.
We heard people refer to the crowd as, "The Swarm". Struggles ensued in the crowd, cops wrestled people to the ground and cuffed them as the crowd screamed at them. The crowd was on the verge of becoming a mob.
We contingency planned an evacuation. If that waving flag began to burn, if there were shots fired, if the crowd became a mob... we'd hot foot it out of there.
The fireworks began and it distracted the crowd.
--The moral of the story is, Situational Awareness.
