Recently, protests have increasingly gone on the road . . . literally. On Monday pro-Palestinian protesters blocked the highway leading to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, causing travelers leaving on flights from one of the country’s busiest airports to leave their cars and lug their suitcases to their terminals, as shown in the photo above. Similar demonstrations also blocked busy bridges and highways in other parts of the country.
It’s an old tactic to try to focus attention on a cause. It’s also a dangerous and self-defeating one. It’s dangerous because one of those blocked roads could have prevented the passage of an ambulance carrying a patient to a hospital in an emergency situation, where even a delay of a few minutes could mean the difference between life or death. It’s also dangerous because one of the travelers walking to O’Hare on a road not designed for pedestrians could have been inadvertently struck by a frustrated driver trying to get to a parking area. And it’s self-defeating because you wouldn’t think that the inconvenienced passengers heading to O’Hare, or the commuters delayed for hours by protests that closed other roads and bridges, will be in a mood to look kindly on the Palestinian cause.
The reality is that unpermitted road protests aren’t designed to persuade. Every major city has plenty of public spaces where demonstrators could appear, advocate for their cause, and make it onto the evening news–without ruining someone’s commute or causing a traveler to miss a flight. By choosing to block roads and bridges, demonstrators show that they want to be disruptive, and really don’t care who they inconvenience or what kind of chaos they create. They view their chosen cause as far more important than letting the rest of us go about our days in peace, and figure that wreaking havoc is a small price to pay for drawing even more attention.
It’s a selfish and desperate tactic, frankly, and one that I suspect will boomerang–but I doubt that the protesters who took the action think that far ahead.
Webner House 