There's
something rotten going on in the Great White North, but I understand it's fixing to
come down to Flagtown and maybe head East to the Jersey Shore, and tangle with smokies and bears in the air and whatnot along the way. Now, if you are younger than 40, you probably have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, but if you can remember where you were when Jimmy Carter was sworn in, then you know I'm talking
about the convoy.
There is a lot that is disturbing about this--the convoy doesn't represent all truckers, just a contingent of them that looks massive because trucks are massive. The convoy kind of looks a little bit astroturfed and purely political, a lot. Truckers are blue collar heroes of the open road, but these folks aren't representing concerns like the costs of people doing the contract job of hauling, the hours, the safety. They are raising a political ruckus in a way that is intimidating (a truck can be a tank in a world where vehicles have been used as weapons against pedestrians--and who knows if it doesn't harbor fertilizer or explosives?) and now associated with racial undertones, vandalism, and right wing politics.
What is the result of their tantrum against vaccine mandates, of all things? Fear and tension. Terror for health care workers. They are making people feel unsafe. They are draining city resources where they turn up, and creating a nuisance.
And the funding is damn fishy. I get deeply skeptical when I see US right-wing pols and media glom on to things elsewhere, and when Trump weighs in and there is some dubious Go Fund Me issue afoot, I start thinking our internal saboteurs are making a test run against a stable democracy to see what might be accomplished here. I mean, take stock of what Flynn and Bannon and other Trump associates like, well, corporate Fox News, have done encouraging anti-vaxx and anti-mask protests, and how anti-mandate-ism, along with the anti-CRT (and by now, essentially anti-education/books) movement has been used against soft targets like hospitals and school boards and libraries, with the effect of often-female staffed professions like nursing, teaching, and librarians getting hollowed-out.
The damage done by this kind of destabilizing protest well outweighs any potential rewards--I mean, like, end the vaccine mandate? Okay, so go and catch a face-full of covid, see if we care. But how messed-up is that as a goal, as goals go? This isn't about people demanding the right to catch Covid and spread it all they want. Maybe it's protest for the sake of anything at all, because of a need to feel like a part of history. To fuck it all and go be an hero.
I get it. But just as with 1/6, if you find yourself alongside people sporting Confederate flags and swastikas, and aren't second-guessing, you are absolutely on the wrong side of shit. And this convoy doesn't seem to be about freedom, as much as it is about intimidation and warlordism--taking control of local areas and fucking up their ability to restore order. That isn't civil discourse, but terrorism. And we don't want it here in the US, either.
People need to come to their senses about a protest response, generated by internet malefactors and funded by who-knows-who, well and truly disproportionate to one's actual level of grievance, or at the very least, inspect what the true grievance is. Think about the things you are thinking about!
The idea of being a temporary outlaw might in the moment feel historic, but if it isn't about something righteous, why even venture it? If it involves abrogating others' rights, how is it noble, even? Why can we not understand how to be better citizens to one another, better neighbors, better at all?
I'd love it if that was where the discourse was. But there is no Rubber Duck here. And if we found him, he'd be backed by wrong money and bad ideas.
