Canadian Truckers: History Rhymes
'Who are the protesters', asks the NYTimes, 'and what do they want?'
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/12/world/canada-protest-trudeau#who-are-canada-truck-protesters
Q: Who are the protesters?
A: Working class males.
Q: What do they want?
A: Fun. A street party, with flags, honking horns, and red meat on the grill. A guy party, where they can display their big trucks and guy-ness.
Street events are always more fun when there’s a Cause—whether it’s football fandom, anti-vaxx or, as it was back in the Vietnam Era, anti-war.
Back in the day anti-war demonstrations were fun, an alternative to Spring Break for the better class of undergraduate. We marched, we shouted, we scored drugs, we hooked up and at the better demonstrations there would be a concert, by Buffy-Judy-Joanie or some other lank-haired folk singer, at the destination. And we peacocked: we displayed our youth, our coolness, our rage against the machine. The media loved us because we were photogenic and featured us as a Movement.
But we got push-back, first by the Chicago cops who cracked heads at the Democratic Party convention demonstration and later by NYC construction workers during the Hard Hat Riot. The general public was not sympathetic either. After National Guard soldiers shot students at a peaceful anti-war rally at Kent State University, killing four, a Gallup poll showed that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students while only 11 percent blamed the National Guard.
We viewed ourselves as an oppressed minority fighting Establishment slave-masters, as per The Student as Nigger; the general public regarded us as destructive vandals, useful idiots of Communist infiltrators, or spoiled brats throwing away everything they were busting their butts to give their kids. Some pundits predicted ‘the bluing of America’: we children of the elite, doped up and preoccupied with street theater, would turn on, tune in, and drop out leaving the places prepared for us in management and the professions to the children of blue-collar cops and construction workers.
We imagined that we were Intellectuals leading the Revolution and would soon be joined by the oppressed Proletariat with whom, in solidarity, we would overthrow the Establishment. But people, especially the oppressed Proletariat, did not like us. They did not like us because we made a mess and inconvenienced them.
History rhymes. People will get fed up with the Canadian street party and the copycat events that have already begun. It does not matter that, unlike our January 6th insurgents, they are unarmed and unlikely to do violence. They are stopping traffic. On the pretext of protesting the disruption of lives by Covid restrictions they are creating further disruption which is not likely to endear them to a public aching for a return to normalcy.
The Vietnam War wound down and, post hoc ergo propter hoc, we imagined that we had been instrumental in putting an end to it. We hadn’t, of course. The larger American public was already thoroughly sick of the war and the government was scrambling to find a way out. Covid seems to be on the wane and, whether it is or not, restrictions are coming down in response to pandemic fatigue. And once mask and vaxx mandates are rescinded the truckers will declare victory and go home.