The protest at Vermont Yankee yesterday was advertised ahead of time as going to have 1500 people and 300 arrests. To me, it looks like there were about 200 people, though the Brattleboro Reformer said there were 300. Forty were arrested. Here's a video of the protest.
I generally don't share opponent videos, but this one made me angry. The theme of the protest was a cow..MOOOve on, Entergy! That was the theme. The protestors simulated cow sounds with shofars. Some people blew shofars, while others chanted "Mooo." That's disgusting.
The blasts of the shofar are sacred in Jewish worship, and the sound has been sacred for thousands of years. Simulating a cow at a protest with a shofar--it's too much. There's cute, and there's nasty. This was nasty.
When the attendance is low, I guess they do what they can to make a stink.
This rally stunk.
Update: I appreciate Jeff Schmidt's comment below. The people perhaps did not mean to be sacrilegious and disrespectful. Perhaps they simply thought: "wow, these things make a cool sound like a bleating cow or something." In other words, what I thought was nasty might have been simply dumb and uninformed.
I am willing to accept that as a possible explanation, though I consider it unlikely. I mean, if you buy a shofar, someone probably tells you about it. You don't buy a shofar and wonder "what is this thing?"
At any rate, I thank Schmidt for his comment. Schmidt is also quite right that the low turnout is the important part of the story. However, if they hadn't been so disrespectful (or possibly dumb) about my religion, I wouldn't have blogged about their rally. Unfortunately, my blogging about it probably just teaches them to be more disrespectful about religion next time, to get more publicity.
Meredith,
ReplyDeleteMy take on the Shofar thing is that probably, the protesters meant no disrespect to Judaism. In fact, some of them are very possibly Jewish themselves. I can understand why you might find it offensive, and as a non-Jew, I certainly would be very loathe to do something like that.
However, I think the bigger news is that the protest groups couldn't get anywhere near the number of protestors they claimed they would.
It has always, so far as I know, been the case that the "organized opposition" to nuclear power has been able to get people out to protests and things. Even though polls show that opponents are actually a small minority of the general public. But, that small minority has always been more motivated to get out than the "silent majority" which support nuclear.
I'd say the organized opposition, such as it is, appears to be possibly at an historic low, at least here in the U.S.
I suppose, to be fair, external circumstances like bad weather and such might have kept attendance lower than it otherwise might have been, but still, I think we can take away from this that nobody cares about these "rallies" anymore except the anti-nukes themselves.
I know I don't spend much time worrying about most protests anymore. People will protest anything and everything, so a few hundred malcontents at a protest has little persuasive effect on me, and I suspect that is true of most of the public, most legislators/congressmen, regulators, and other policy-makers.
You can't have low intelligence and be riding a bicycle!
ReplyDeleteGreen power is so dangerously over hyped...
Don't even get me talking about altruism abuse!
lligan: "You can't have low intelligence and be riding a bicycle!"
ReplyDeleteReally? Are you sure? There are plenty of instances of bears being trained to ride bicycles. What is the IQ of a bear?
I noticed how the cow got there. A big 8 cylinder suv brought it there. They drop it off 2 blocks from the plant. Then they get home made windmills connected to nothing so it turns easier. even then I noticed that the wind wasn't there that to make them turn. Why didn't the bike riders ride there from their homes? Too far? So the point of the protest was close the nuclear power plant,Use more gasoline!
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