Revolt of the Normals

Armed with Donuts, and Standing Up to the Blowhards

History sometimes turns on small things.

Saturday night, according to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, a professor at the city’s Carleton University read that a convoy of trucks would be rolling through his neighborhood the next morning, headed downtown to join the collection of sorehead anti-vaxxers, racists, and general Trumpish blowhards who had been “occupying” the center of the Canadian capital for three weeks, making life miserable for everyone in the area. Their “freedom convoy”—with financial and political ties to rightwingers south of the border—had spawned imitators across the country and around the world, a kind of fast-spreading virus of smug hatefulness. The police and politicians had done nothing to stop them; journalists endlessly parroted their talking points, helping make them an ever-larger-seeming force.

But the professor—Sean Burges—posted a call on a neighborhood Facebook page usually “dedicated to arranging playdates and dogwalking.” He asked his neighbors if some of them might join him Sunday morning to try and peacefully stop the arriving convoy, simply slowing their roll into the center city long enough to get across the point that “you are disrupting the lives of people in Ottawa. Please stop.”

At first a couple of dozen people showed up, a few with signboards and magic markers; soon their numbers began to swell. They were able to corral the convoy, putting their bodies in the way and, in effect, putting drivers and passengers under citizens arrest for hour upon hour. They talked with as many of them as they could, explaining their anger. “Most of the people I spoke to were surprised at the resistance,” one man said. “I think the convoy is under the false impression that they have unwavering popular support. It helps them to see opposition.” Indeed, polling shows three in four Canadians want them to head home—the country, by and large, has been good about vaxxing and masking, understanding it to be a way to care for and protect each other. The absurd rattling on about “freedom” seemed like what it was—a dilute strain of Trumpish puffery (not entirely unknown, it must be said, in a country that had elected a populist crackhead mayor of its largest city a few years back.)

In any event, it worked—by day’s end the small band of neighborhood resisters numbered in the hundreds or thousands. They held an ongoing discussion about their terms for releasing the convoy—finally they were allowed to turn around and drive away, one by one, but only after they’d surrendered the jerrycans of fuel they were carrying to the main occupiers downtown, and more symbolically and more importantly, after they’d handed over their racist flags and banners.

It was, I think you could say, a Revolt of the Normals—people who were tired of seeing extremists have their way, especially when it meant disrupting daily life. It wasn’t bandana-clad “antifa” picking fights and looking for action; it was people who brought so many donuts to the gathering that the excess was donated to a homeless shelter

It would be harder and more dangerous to try such a thing this side of the border—American idiots are likely to be carrying guns, and a number of legislatures have passed laws allowing people to run over protesters who get in the path of their cars. But we should be hard at work channeling the spirit of this resistance—what the locals were quickly calling “The Battle of Billings Bridge”—wherever we can. We’ve watched long enough as loudmouths have had their way, deferring to their anger. But their irresponsibility has done more than cause economic damage (“freedom convoys” shutting down international trade at the border may have cost several hundred million dollars in the last week); these are the people who have kept a pandemic alive.

As the hometown newspaper editorialized after the success of the resistance:

Counter-protesters who braved a bone-chilling weekend to physically block more truckers from joining the occupation of Ottawa’s downtown have sent a crystal-clear message. And the rest of the city is cheering their actions. We are fed up. We are enraged. If the authorities don’t act, citizens have shown that they will.

There are more of us than there are of them. If we react nonviolently, with goodwill, good humor, good spirit, and donuts then maybe we can end a bit more of the nonsense.