By David Robb ——Bio and Archives--March 28, 2024

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Governments are organized around the strongest gang principle.

If you are a member of the gang, you can act with the power of the gang behind you. You can call on the resources of the gang to protect you and oppose others. Those who do not belong are at the mercy of the gang, unless they are members of some other gang of significant power.

I must commend the brave truck drivers of Canada, the farmers throughout Europe, and even the millions of protesters in Brazil and elsewhere who struggled against the injustices of their own governments. Unfortunately, their protests have been and are likely to continue to be in vain.

Once it was true that governments actually listened to the grievances of their citizens and sought to improve matters. Current governments, though, see themselves as the ones who know best what is needed, and neither appreciate nor consider the wishes of their citizens. They share the same sense of entitlement that was characteristic of previous generations of aristocrats. "Let them eat cake" has become "Let them eat bugs".

The Canadian truckers and the European farmers have two things in common that are the seeds of failure. They lack a coherent outcome they are determined to achieve, and they lack the resources to persevere until that outcome is obtained. Both problems result from the mistaken notion that governments exist to serve the people rather than that governments exist to serve themselves.

Simply asking for the government to modify some ruling, such as a vaccine mandate or land use restriction is not a sufficient objective. If there is sufficient protest, a government may temporarily relent and relax or remove the cause of the protest. Officials may simply make a strategic retreat.

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Once the protest has ended, though, and the protesters disperse, the government invariably comes back with something worse in place of that which they were forced to yield. Worse, the dispersed protesters can now be picked off one by one as they no longer have the strength of numbers that is their protection. The military expression is "divide and conquer".

Rather than seeing protests as legitimate expressions of the desires of the citizens it is their duty to serve,........

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