But in the end, I understood the tolerant response. The crowd on the streets of Washington D.C. on Wednesday was not part of an antiwar movement. The dancing kids and ridiculously costumed protesters are what we have today instead of an antiwar movement. A true antiwar movement, like the one from the 1960s, causes real chaos, affects public opinion, and ultimately can influence policy and our political culture. That’s not the case with United for Peace and Justice. Its members are clowns who are looking for a good street party that’s made more exciting by a whiff of protest and danger.
Arresting, manhandling, or otherwise cracking down hard on them would just feed into their martyr complex and generate a lot of sympathetic media attention. When they’re left alone to act out their fantasies, they discredit themselves. If the price for keeping this circus sideshow from metastasizing into a real political movement is that some local drivers get delayed at intersections once in a while, then that’s not much of a price at all.
So basically it’s “police do nothing, women and clowns hardest hit?”