As every 22nd -century schoolbot knows, the stolen election of 2004 ignited a firestorm of protest that finally brought down the illegitimate presidency of George W. Bush.
A uniquely American feature of these protests was the "park-in." This phenomenon was partly an outgrowth of the so-called flashmob, which made use of the newly popular cellular phone to coordinate the arrival of many people at a prearranged location. It owed its remarkable efficacy to the dependence of early 21st-century Americans on automotive transport.
A park-in would begin when a clot of cars on a major artery suddenly slowed and came to a stop. The drivers would then get out of their parked cars, lock the doors, get into a van waiting at the front of the group, and drive off. In a sardonic gesture, many of the drivers would then call the police to report that their cars had been stolen.
Carried out simultaneously on several major roads during rush hour, the park-ins proved devastatingly effective at bringing entire cities, literally, to a halt. Traffic quickly backed up for miles behind the parked cars. Police in the 21st century had developed systems of crowd control that were effective at dispersing large numbers of people. But they had no tools for dispersing crowds of vehicles. There weren't enough tow trucks to remove the parked cars, and when traffic was blocked off in both directions, the tow trucks simply could not reach the sites. In some cases, tow trucks would arrive at the scene of a park-in, only to be blocked in by a second wave of cars.
Establishment commentators lashed out at the park-in participants, publicizing stories of sick or injured people unable to reach hospitals because ambulances could not travel the blocked roads. In a widely quoted retort, a Mrs. Sylvia Sanchez snapped, "I saw on TV that George gave the eulogy at that girl's funeral. Where was he when my son's coffin came home from Iraq?"
In the end, of course, the election stalemate was resolved when repentant computer programmer Charles Rover came forward and confessed to writing the code that transferred every third Kerry vote to Bush, thereby creating Bush's apparent five-point win in Ohio and other key states. Historians agree that the emergence of the Internet was a critical factor in the success of the national uprising against the stolen election, permitting decentralized yet coordinated protests. Nevertheless, historians credit the park-in with a pivotal role in the paralysis of "business as usual" that prevented a repeat of 2000.