At the April 17th, 21HY meeting, Anna asked for time to speak.
No one gave it a second thought. The rules of order were pretty lax at the meetings, and if you wanted to introduce a topic that you weren’t really sure what you wanted to do with, you could. She’d done it before, talking about a few different things.
She was given five minutes.
She spoke for fifty-three.
No one stopped her. Not because she refuse to stop, no one even tried to stop her. Because absolutely no one could even conceive of doing so. Mesmerizing is bit of an overused word, but she was, very literally, mesmerizing.
And she gave a speech asserting that all people had a right to self-determination, to live under a government of their choosing. That they were all one people, regardless of where and when they were from, who had ended up in here, who had to work together to forge a world. That it was fine to accept help from Project Zero but they needed to stand up, stand together and actually build the world that they wanted to live in.
Her speech burned.
The meeting didn’t continue, people had literally forgotten they were in a meeting, that there were other people in line to talk, other things on the agenda. Everyone gave a standing ovation, and then filed out or came up to talk to her.
The speech was immediately all over social media, and two minutes after that someone had realized who she was historically, and posted it, which she confirmed with a simple ‘Yes, that’s me.’
And consensus shifted. Almost just like that.