The Joy Of Interesting Times

 

In quiet little Avon Lake, hundreds (the Avon Lake cops said “thousands”) of ordinary people stood on the side of the road by a Walgreens and a duck pond waving signs and protesting the turns of events in the country.  What was especially noteworthy to me was the demographic makeup.  This wasn’t some lefty multi colored hair crowd.  It was grandmas, moms and daughters, conservative looking old men, and kids in wagons.  It seemed like everyone had their own particular issue that had brought them to a tipping point to stand around in the rain in a sleepy little suburb.  Take your pick… tariffs, cratering 401K accounts, Ukraine, illegal deportations, civil liberties, Elon Musk, Trump, you name it.  People were fed up and it’s week 12 of Taking America Back.

I’m thinking there were about 700 people, but I might be low.  They stretched along what is an entire city block while drivers coming through honked their horns in support (or counter protest).  Young men, high school boys I think, drove pick-up trucks and Mustangs with growling exhaust systems with oversized Trump flags attached like they were members of a radicalized Muslim extremist group (which you can effectively argue that they are).   The sneering boys had the jacked up confrontational energy of rabid college football fans, the kind of boys that played varsity football and swaggered around school thinking they have all the answers but don’t realize they don’t even understand the questions and they’ve already peaked.  

I drove south on Route 83 behind a red F-150 with two giant Trump flags flapping from plastic posts attached to the back of the bed.  Watching traffic coming at him in the other lane, a steady stream of people flipping the truck off was interrupted by the occasional guy that looked just like the driver giving them a thumbs up.  “Yeah Bro!”.  The chance of any of the flag guys being able to explain what a tariff is, what the CDC does, or understand how their heroes they worship like a pro football team on gameday were just grifters positioning them to be their low paid worker drones forever.  What are you going to do?  The country is really, really fucked up right now.  

What struck me most about today was the ordinary look of the protesters.  These aren’t the dreaded “outside agitators” the conservative media will rush in to claim took part in these events.  It’s retired teachers, stay-at-home moms, Dads pulling wagons.  I’ll bet 85% of these people never protested a thing in their lives.  While the hillbillies and dipshits drove by threateningly in their macho vehicles it only pointed out the irrefutable fact that there are a lot more normal people than teenage bullies and angry hillbillies.  The flag waving dipshits feel like they’re in a special club, but they can’t get around the fact that the real people that make the country run are looking at this shitshow and saying “Hold on a minute here, this is bullshit”.  

I don’t know if the protest movement can gain momentum, or if it will even do anything against what is increasingly looking like monsters that are intent to topple over all our societal norms to benefit themselves.  They aren’t going to pay attention to the legal system, and Congress isn’t going to do anything either.  It’s going to be up to the Moms, grandmas and Dads pulling wagons to try and prevent the country they grew up in from further slipping into an autocratic nightmare you’ll never wake up from.    

I spent the week in Portugal with an international group of MW students and Portuguese producers.  Off of the top of my head, there were people from England, Ireland, Greece, Canada, Austria, Germany, China, Netherlands, Poland, and Spain.  It was NOT easy being the American there.  Anyone with an education knows what is going on in the USA is self-destructive and utterly without long term logical planning.  It’s not even a debate over here.  It's other nations openly laughing about how inept and rudderless our leadership is in the country.  It’s like how adults laugh at children.  The downside for them is that until they disentangle themselves from the US, they are in for a ride as well.  As the minute-to-minute whims of our de-facto King changed, they laughed at the absurdity of it all and asked me to make sense of it.  Hey man, I don’t know what to tell you either.  

I was at a winery in Rioja Spain yesterday.  Rioja wines famously use American oak barrels, abandoning the use of French barrels after a tariff placed on the barrels by France over 100 years ago.  As a result of that tax, the Spanish moved to the alternative option coming from America and then never went back.  100+ years of lost business for the French who assumed at the time, “they can’t buy around us”.  Well, it looks like they did.  After this Tariff Show has shaken the world’s confidence in our economy, I think we are going to find out that people can buy around us too.    

Ah, the joy of living in “interesting times”…