As Oliver Wendell Holmes observed of the First Amendment, free thought is “not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought we hate.” We must be willing to accept those protests which represent political orientations that we find distasteful. But regardless of content, there are some forms of protest that are inherently illegitimate. This week’s Save America Fund “Truck Out Rally,” which took a stand against allegedly lax immigration policy, was one such protest.
The three-day “Truck Out” was supposed to shut down traffic on the Capital Beltway by asking truckers to slow to the speed limit and impede other vehicles by driving bumper to bumper. If the “Truck Out” had gone as planned, it would have represented a major obstacle to many ordinary commuters totally unrelated to the nation’s immigration policy. Fortunately, the protest didn’t cause major backups, according to Sgt. Arthur Betts, a spokesman for the Maryland State Police.
“It hasn’t materialized into much of anything,” Betts said. “We were aware of the potential so we had extra troops out there. But not much has happened.”
The best protests make injustice unavoidably apparent, forcing it into the public eye. Sit-ins during the Civil Rights movement forced America to confront the irrationality of segregation laws as people were arrested and abused for nothing more than sitting in the wrong place at a restaurant, the site of these injustices. Rallies on the National Mall show the sheer size and intensity of public support or dissent.
But the Truck Out is hardly related to the issue in question, except in the specious way the Fund—which did not respond to requests for comment—claims that truckloads of immigrants are coming across the border. It will not direct public attention to the Fund’s policy objectives. At most, it will severely inconvenience commuters who are trying to get to their homes, workplaces and schools. It is in many ways akin to the temper tantrum thrown by a toddler who hasn’t gotten his way and, in frustration, breaks his favorite toy. The Save America Fund didn’t prove anything other than the fact that it doesn’t know how to properly communicate its desires and to control its reactions to disappointment.
The Fund’s platform is ill-conceived and often offensive: their website asserts that letting Mexican immigrants into the country will “[allow] the foreign takeover of our beloved country.” In answer to those who object to their extreme positions, they ask, “would they rather have it their way and watch our Constitution be destroyed, our sovereignty destroyed and every citizen in America enslaved to a fascist govt [sic] so they are not inconvenienced for three days?”
When you put it like that, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to sit in blocked traffic for hours?
Though the Fund’s platform may be odious and their rhetoric absurd, they, like the rest of us, must be free to assemble and engage in the public discourse that underlies democratic policy-making. But while these anti-immigration protesters may think they’re traffic jamming for a cause, in the end they’re doing nothing more than driving District residents crazy.
