A SPONTANEOUS EMBARGO?

It has long been a fantasy of the Perpetually Aggrieved that they can End War and Bring About Harmonic Convergence by ... sitting in front of trains.  Which is stupid, especially if you think that your statement will be more dramatic if you begin your sit-in as the train approaches.  That's a good way to lose, at a minimum, a foot.  That actually happened, in the San Francisco Bay area, during the Reagan years, but interfering with trains to disrupt the military-industrial complex goes back at least to the late Vietnam War era.  On the other hand, when real enemy agents attempted to interfere with real trains, in a real war, some of them got to sit in an electric chair.

But the fantasy lives on from the Weathermen down, most recently in the port of Olympia, Washington.

Among the protestors' demands is that the rail line no longer be used to transport fossil fuels or anything that's part of "military infrastructure." They are demanding "democratic" control of the port by the community as a whole -- which would not be "democratic," but socialist.

They also want to transition port employees over to mythical "green" jobs.

Once upon a time, The Milwaukee Road, which once served Olympia, used white coal to power trains, and a Milwaukee branch served Hanford, Washington, where the research that made nuclear steam electricity a reality took place, and both nuclear and hydro power are realistic responses to the cinders that blind and the carbon dioxide that accompanies the burning of coal and other fossil fuels.

But there's that little problem of using hydro power to help make atomic bombs ...

There's also that little problem that the Perpetually Aggrieved do not make friends or influence wavering people with their certitude and their virtue signalling.

These folks have a right to protest, but they don't have a right to trespass on property and they have no right to inhibit commerce. They need to be either arrested, or at the very least dragged away from the tracks so business can get back to normal.

What these Leftist protestors don't understand is that they're never going to actually win with these tactics. All they're doing is pissing people off. Do that enough and no one will give a damn why you're protesting.

It might be that they're protesting at the wrong port, anyway. I have some stories ...  But Olympia is close to Seattle, and Seattle is full of Perpetually Aggrieved types, and the trains get blocked.