Protests:  from the silly to the sublime

 

Protests are currently happening all over the world.  Some of the protests – such as the majority here in the U.S. – are a result of too many people with too much time on their hands.  Anti-Trumpers constitute a large percentage of protesters here in the homeland.  Then there are those in the grievance industry who protest the various phantom “injustices” in the U.S.  Many of these folks are simply spoiled, whiny “progressives,” who after eight years of Barrack Obama, thought their vision of a government-induced utopia was finally coming to fruition. They were wrong.  Think of the many crying, sniffling college students who were on the verge of a mental breakdown after President Trump was inaugurated.  The result: equally-as-silly adult administrators at universities across the nation created “safe spaces” for the multitude of weak-minded, myopic students crying for  a haven from the real world.  Let’s examine some of the other protests happening around the world.

 

Spain

The Catalonia region of northeast Spain recently attempted a vote for independence from Spain.  The uprising was put down, and declared illegal by the Spanish government.  Police seized 10 million ballots and arrested at least 12 persons, mostly Catalan government officials, suspected of coordinating the referendum back in early October.  The arrests were the first involving Catalan government officials since a campaign began in earnest in 2011 for a vote on independence from Spain.  Back on Sept. 21, a city square, the size of two soccer fields, was filled by tens of thousands of Catalonia citizens chanting “We will vote,” and “Hello democracy.”  Catalonia represents one-fifth of Spain’s $1.32 trillion economy and enjoys wide self-governance, although key areas such as infrastructure and taxes are in the hands of central authorities.  One of the main grievances expressed by disgruntled Catalan residents is that their wealthy region hands too much revenue (read “taxes”) to the central socialist Spanish government.

 

Norway

Norway’s upcoming election has sparked a wide-ranging debate – and some protests – about national values, leaving voters wrestling with how close the Nordic country should be to the European Union (EU) and what its responsibilities are toward migrants and asylum-seekers.  Norway is not a member of the EU, but it has access to the EU single market of  half-a-billion people.  It also accepts the free movement of EU workers, enacts reams of EU laws, and pays a membership fee to do that.  Norway’s Center Party leader Sygve Slagsvold said: “We are a country that has always opposed elites, and the EU is an elite that takes too much power away from our parliament.  We think it transfers too much sovereignty to an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels [headquarters for the EU].”

 

Russia

On President Vladimir Putin’s 65th birthday earlier in October, he was met with jeers of “Putin must go,” and “Democracy now.”  The protests – dominated by young people – were originally planned only for Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, but quickly spread to other Russian cities.  An estimated 700 protestors assembled in Moscow. More than 80 protestors were arrested nationwide, but police allowed most of the peaceful protests to proceed.  The protests caught fire after leading Putin critic Alexei Navalny and his campaign chief were arrested and jailed on the first Monday in October. Navalyny is Putin’s biggest challenger for the coming Russian presidential election, but multiple media sources have reported that Russia’s election commission will bar Navalny from running because of a criminal conviction that some consider to be politically motivated. Protests against Russia’s socialist government, and Putin in particular, have been sporadically occurring on a smaller scale since May of 2017.

 

Protestors in the U.S. try to create phantom “social injustices” which do not exist.  Protestors in countries other than the U.S. are trying to escape from socialist governments which do oppress and limit the freedoms of its citizenry.  If only the elitists American protestors would realize that the U.S. is the fairest and freest form of all the world’s government, they might ask  so why protest?  Don’t hold your breath.

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