The Mass Demonstrations For Quarantine

The trouble with paraphrasing is that in the process you accidentally can end up talking about something completely different, and then I get all pedantic in the service of making a point. John Philpin paraphrased John Gruber on the matter of public protests.

It’s never wise to gauge public opinion solely by looking at protests, but in this particular case it could not possibly be more misleading. By definition, only the people who think these restrictions are nonsense/unnecessary/too broad/whatever are even willing to congregate in large groups. You can’t hold a public rally in support of stay-at-home orders.

The reason why I countered that this is not the same as saying “you can’t publicly protest to support ‘shelter in place’” is that these daily evening rounds of applause and pots-banging people have been doing from their stay-at-home porches, balconies, and windows in support of frontline workers arguably in fact are public protests—technically (pedantically?)—demonstrations) in support of “shelter-in-place”.

It’s the “public rally” that’s stymied by the very nature of being voluntary shut-ins, barring car-based demonstrations which present their own issues.

Maybe what we need is to get creative, and technological: maybe what we need is a sort of central clearinghouse of daily videos, all hosted on a single page that’s updated every day with the previous evening’s mass, if distributed, affirmation.

It’s not that the majority is silent. It’s that they currently can’t be seen or heard outside of their own physical communities en masse.

We could change that.