Protests

 

I’m certainly happy I don’t live in Ottawa today.  There is a protest going on downtown there as you all probably know.  As with most protests, there does not seem to be any consensus about what the actual message from the protest really is.  In support of the truckers in Ottawa there are also protests across the country, also seemingly with mixed messages.  In my new city of Peterborough, Ontario, I saw a group of protesters downtown on Saturday.  Actually, it looked like two protests, one across the street from the other.  On one side of the street, I saw about 20 protesters holding signs which read “Save our Children” (from what was never stated) and on the other side was another 20 seeming to be in support of the truckers in Ottawa. 

Of course, protests are nothing new. They are probably as old as the beginning of the organization of humans.  Children protesting against their elders cannot be a new phenomenon.  There were protests in ancient Greece and Rome.  Some of them got down-right bloody and some even resulted in civil wars.  But most of them were very local.  Why? No rapid communication.  It was hard to organize a spontaneous demonstration when it took a week to travel from one side of a country to the other. 

Every civil war starts as a protest.  Very few protests achieve their stated purpose. Even protests that seem to achieve their purpose such as deposing a leader usually ends up with a leadership that the protesters did not want.  How many protests begin with a cry for democracy and end up with a brutal dictatorship?  Just ask many of the countries in Africa and Middle East.  Even the infamous 6^th of January 2021 protest in Washington failed, spectacularly.

Now we have instant communications.  No sooner had the truckers in British Columbia announced their intentions to form a convoy to Ottawa than truckers from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick decided to join them.   And every step of the way was covered by the media.  I bet Wat Tyler (a leader of the Peasants Revolt in England in 1381) wished he had had such coverage.  But that seems to be the aim of many protests, to attract media attention; to create false heroes; to make outrageous demands.  What started out as an anti-vaccine mandate protest has now turned out to be a demand for a change of government, even a for a government run by the protesters themselves.  The word most heard is “freedom”.

But freedom is not, and never has been, absolute.  Freedom is restricted by customs, religious rules, and laws.  Even our Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not absolute.  They seem to want freedom for themselves, but not freedom for others to remain healthy.  If there was absolute freedom, I could take one of their trucks or attack a protester without recourse. 

It’s kind of funny to see a large protest in Canada in the middle of winter.  Spring and summer are usually the favoured seasons.  You get more people out then, protesters and spectators alike.  I used to work on the 11^th floor of an office building in Ottawa on Laurier Avenue at the corner of Elgin Street.  From my office, I could see all the way down to the Parliament buildings.  It was quite common to see groups of protesters marching on Elgin to or away from Parliament Hill carrying their flags and signs.  They, like so many protests, never seemed to achieve anything.

Protest for protest’s sake.