Pity the activists upstaged by COVID

The streets of all the great cities of North America are almost completely free of traffic. For the occasional solitary who does venture out for a spin, in Toronto for example, this has to be the first time in 50 years it is actually possible to get from somewhere in the downtown to somewhere else perhaps not even in the downtown, without a massive spike in blood pressure and hardly a hint of cardiac arrest. It might even be called a pleasure. And when was the last time pleasure and driving in Toronto met, embraced and went out on a date?

I am sure the same is true in Vancouver, or New York, or Houston.

It is an experience to be savoured, for, once the plague lifts, we shall not see the like again in our lifetimes.

While all are rightfully saluting our health professionals, and the grocery clerks, and the truck drivers, there are others to be considered as well. For some lives have been disrupted more than others.

Please during this strange and anxious time, spare a thought and say a prayer for unemployed activists of all stripes, the one-timers, the full-timers, the masked and the unmasked, the blockaders and the street-marchers.

Starbucks is closed, so what is the point of smashing its windows? Not much point either in staging a “die-in” (the term itself should be seriously avoided considering the nature of the crisis we’re in) in front of a fried-chicken outlet. There will be no one there to look at your mock mortality. And if you’re the kind of social justice warrior who’s up a-night worrying about, I quote, “the oppressed bodies of the chicken,” then these are melancholy times. “Dream of feathers and flocks, my young friend — better days will emerge, the Cock will crow and the fast-food chains await your return.”

Downtowns are empty so “performance” activists have no audience. These days they could jump up and down all day in the intersection of Yonge and Bloor and at best only a few pigeons and a few vagrant pedestrians would be there to notice.

So what’s the under-occupied oppression artist to do? Stay home and memorize the hot bits of Das Kapital and do a bingewatch of (pre-pandemic) Michael Moore movies. (On penalty of nervous shock, do not watch Planet of the Humans.)

Before the pandemic, the rail services of this country were a veritable playground for enthusiastic demonstrators. You could have a blockade in B.C. one day, Quebec the next, and hit Via Rail in Ontario whenever the mood struck you. These good folks are now totally stymied. For it is established (somewhere in Einstein’s early work on trains and relativity, I think) that to have a blockade, something must be moving. This is especially true of trains, the great man asserted.

Or as another genius put it even more succinctly — I believe it was famed lawyer Johnnie Cochran — “If the trains are stopped, they’re impossible to block.”

At the hard end of mostly urban protest, things are no better. Idle No More is now just … Idle. And what about the brave soldiery of Antifa, sworn hunters of MAGA hats and other MAGA derivative merchandise.

When can Antifa go now, in their black face masks, to do a beat down on a gay Asian reporter (Andy Ngo) who is also (they say) a “Nazi?” Where can they go now to surround, shout at, and otherwise brutally harass an old woman with a walker on her way to a meeting? Most of our old people can’t go to meetings now, which leaves the Antifa vigilantes horribly unoccupied.

The crisis also hits their street cred where it hurts.

The black face masks that are their chosen insignia — meant to stir terror among elderly Nazis who navigate by walkers — will, during the COVID-19 pandemic, be seen not as emblems of strength and power, but as mouth guards against a random sneeze. It’s difficult to maintain the heroic stance when you popping Tylenol by the minute, dousing yourself with hand sanitizer and adjusting the old germ fence around your mouth. It is, surely this is ironic, a black day for Antifa.

The same for the Extinction Rebellion crowd. Can’t shut down airports that are already shut down. Even if you could, can you practice safe social-distancing?

The pandemic has also closed down a lot of good plays and theatricals. Of which, the one most to be missed is the “How Dare You” non-musical starring the young Swedish climate contralto, Greta Thunberg. It is sadly in hiatus. Who does not miss the querulous arias of the young musician, that hard, dramatic stare, as she, a Jeremiah in pigtails, with a fury that only immaturity can fuel, gave vital throat to its central hymn: “You old people are stealing my future.” Brought the house down, every time.

I should also mention the displaced pronoun warriors — the xirs and zes and hirs and zirs — those inventive complainers, who took grammar out of the schools and put it to work in special interest politics; the drear COVID has pushed them off the stage, too.

There are ever so many white horses out there these days without their accustomed riders. We miss ‘em all. With apologies to C. Lamb, Where are they “gone, the old familiar farces?”

STARBUCKS IS CLOSED, SO WHAT IS THE POINT OF SMASHING ITS WINDOWS?