It took a relatively short time for some highly organized anarchists, professional pests, unemployable buffoons and Quick Crete distributors disguised as protesters to turn Olympia, Wash. into the “Cuckoo’s Nest” answer to Tiananmen Square.
I first learned of this particular protest while going over the day’s news and running across some pictures of little boys with their faces covered and parents using babies as human shields. Just another day in the Middle East? Nope, this was happening in Washington state.
One of the photos I saw showed a protester so preoccupied with “saving the children” that she dropped her own toddler on the pavement. Chances are good that Lefty Betty Butterfingers is going to view her kid picking blacktop out of his teeth for the next month as a badge of honor.
The protesters (from this point on, I’ll call them “thugs,” because calling this group of people “protesters” is like referring to the Manson Family as “The Sharon Tate Fan Club”) used methods up to and including blocking military traffic and pouring concrete on railroad tracks. Nothing better carries your message of “peace” than a derailed train with the potential of killing innocent people.
The Olympia incidents got me to thinking about the overall state of protest in this country. For the most part, protests in the United States tend to be just plain silly and self-deprecating.
Sure, we have our problems, but in the big picture as it concerns global oppression and misery, we Americans really don’t have a whole lot to complain about. The “Rock Against Bush” concerts a few years back are a prime example. At RAB, musicians arrived in private jets, stayed in five-star hotel suites, rode in limousines and took a stage unimpeded to say whatever they pleased without fear of persecution or prosecution – to demonstrate against the sheer oppression of the Nazi-like Bush regime.
Sean Penn saying that the U.S. “has a dictatorship” and then flying off to lobby for Hugo Chavez’s version of democratic nirvana is another example of someone whose chosen method of “peace” would, were it adopted as policy, lead to his own extinction. But of course there would also be a downside.
The tactics used in Olympia brought to mind an event that occurred halfway around the world in 1989. The people blocking the convoy in Olympia would like nothing more than for us to be reminded of the picture of a briefcase carrying man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square, and to be equated with the brave “tank man.”
In fact, the situation in Olympia had nothing in common with the Tiananmen protest – at least, not in the way the Olympia thugs would like us to believe.
In Olympia, there was absolutely no chance the government trucks were going to put the gear in “drive” and turn the thugs into mushy, picket-sign-strewn speed-bump soup.
Ironically, the kinds of scum who are being fended off by the type of Americans driving the stopped military trucks would have run over the Olympia thugs – and these are the people for whom the Olympia thugs are ultimately siding. You’d have to go back to Ameila Earhart to find a higher profile example of tragic misguidance.
There was also no chance the Olympia thugs would be hauled off to be executed, or, if they were lucky, spend the next 60 years in a labor camp.
That’s the big difference between Olympia and Tiananmen Square, and that’s why these protesters have more in common, in a “guilt by association” sort of way, with the people who drove the tanks in Tiananmen Square than with the people who stood in front of them.
You’ll also notice that Tiananmen Square’s “tank man” didn’t drag his or anybody else’s kids into it, either. That’s something terrorists do. Hence, perhaps, the aversion to the incontinence-inducing term “war on terror.”
An odd thing about the United States is many of those who hate it tend to really enjoy living in it. America is the country of choice for anti-Americans everywhere – it’s even where the U.N. has its headquarters. In actuality, the avoidance of living and protesting in countries that practice what they preach is a sign of at least reasonable intelligence, so maybe there’s hope for the thugs after all.
I hope the antidote for a paradox bite isn’t on board any of those trucks that were stopped in Olympia, because if this kind of thing keeps up we’re all going to need some very soon.
