New Career Opportunities

Colorful protestor at US Capital Building on January 6

I've tried to avoid reading about the protests at the US Capital earlier this week, but some of the blather gets through anyway. This guy was the cream of the crop. What a fine get-up! Reminds me of the way some sports fans bedeck themselves for important games. That, and a post by Brian Micklethwait got me to ruminating.

So I'm mulling over all this noise, trying to make some sense of it, and I think what's going on is we are seeing the emergence of a new occupation: a career protestor. Since the lockdowns started earlier this year, we have a bunch of people out of work, and we have a bunch of sports fans frustrated by the lack of events. Some of these people very much enjoy being in large crowds, all pumped up with emotion. Since there are no sporting events to attend, they look around for another big crowd they can join, and oh, look, there's a protest going on. Let's go down and join the protest! The purpose of the protest is irrelevant. All that matters is that there is a big crowd all pumped up for some cause. They go to the protest and they enjoy it so much that they look around for more protests and they find one scheduled in another town, so they drive or fly to the next city and join that protest, and hey now, it's turned into a riot. Great! Let's break some windows!

Next thing you know they're stealing TV's and selling them. Hey, this is working out pretty well, we get to go a big party, raise a little hell and make some money. This is a lot better than sitting at home going broke and arguing with the wife.

Big crowds, pumped up with emotion, are the way we used to fight wars, and we fought wars like that for tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. We did it for so long that it has become part of our DNA. Not everyone has the full-blown warrior complex, but a sizable proportion of the population does. Sporting events provide an outlet for these impulses. Canceling those events does not cancel the impulse and those impulses are going to find a way to express themselves.

You can argue that protestors who step over the line and start rioting are bad people, and maybe they are, but you can't argue with emotion and emotion is the driving force in these protests / riots.

Did the people who mandated the lockdowns consider the implications? I mean, did they foresee that the lockdowns would lead to widespread protests and riots? I think that would be giving them too much credit. I think they were operating in their political bubble and had no idea what kind of havoc they were unleashing. That does not mean there are not plenty of people taking advantage of the situation, though I am not sure what kind of advantage it could give you. Other than a free TV.