Cara Jennings is a force of nature.
Total disclosure: Cara is an old friend of mine. We spent our twenties traveling to many of the same protests, in an activist performance-art troupe called the Radical Cheerleaders that Cara founded in the late 1990s with her two sisters, Aimee and Colleen. As a young civil rights movement within itself, radical cheerleaders were often found yelling loudly about things like feminism, environmental justice, and labor rights at anyone who was within earshot.
So it wasn’t much of a shock when I logged onto Facebook Tuesday night to discover that a video of Cara had gone viral—a video in which she reads Florida Gov. Rick Scott to filth in a Gainesville Starbucks. I hadn’t seen Cara in years, but there she was, the same fiery, unstoppable anarcha-feminist I remembered so fondly.
