Raging against the wrong machine on the Bay Bridge
Timothy P. Carney
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Protesters in Boston and San Francisco, many of them covering their faces with masks, blocked traffic on the Boston University Bridge and the Bay Bridge.
https://twitter.com/ariel_koko/status/1725181578102685968
Normal people get angry when you block their ability to get to work, get home from work, get your children to school, or get to where your children are. If you are advancing a cause and you make normal people hate you, that seems pretty detrimental to your cause.
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But as some people like to say when it’s their allies protesting, protest is designed to make people uncomfortable. Nothing gets accomplished with safe, comfortable protest.
What’s more, some evils are so intolerable that people need to be grabbed by the lapels and have their attention turned to the evil.
Leah Libresco Sargeant makes a fair point in that tweet. It’s not true that very disruptive protests are never acceptable or productive. It is true, though, that very disruptive protests are usually unacceptable and unproductive, and yet left-wing protesters seem addicted to using such protest in totally inapt situations.
The pro-ceasefire, anti-Biden protesters here do not represent some overwhelming majority of the population. America is pretty evenly split on the question of continued military aid to Israel. This is a matter of live debate. The imagery Sargeant points to is from the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California. These protests were gathering thousands and thousands of students — typically, more than 10% of the student population showed up at the protests.
It was about 80 people who shut down the Bay Bridge. This wasn’t a mass movement. It was a handful of people who really wanted attention but bizarrely felt it was necessary to cover their faces.
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Another problem is that while a majority of Oaklanders and San Franciscans may agree with them that Israel should stop bombing Gaza, it’s not clear how stopping commuters and parents and visitors from traveling between Oakland and San Francisco is, to use Mario Savio’s phrase, grinding “the machine” to a halt.
The “machine” here is either the Israeli military or the U.S. government. The protesters weren’t inconveniencing the people providing aid to Israel or the people dropping bombs in Gaza. The only “machine” they were grinding to a halt was the daily life of ordinary residents.