This one is a perennial irritation of mine: how do protesters manage to live cushioned, warm, and glowing on the very products birthed by conventional energy, while simultaneously screeching about how evil it all is? If coherence mattered even a little, they’d show up dressed like medieval peasants—rough wool, mud-caked boots, maybe a whiff of authentic 14th-century hygiene—to at least look the part. But of course not. It’s apparently far cooler, far sexier, to bask in the comforts provided by the very systems they insist they despise.
Long-term planning and basic coherence are evidently not on their menu. Because if they ever stopped chanting long enough to think, they’d have to confront an inconvenient truth: the instant they “succeed,” all the nice, cushy, modern amenities go straight out the window. Not for “the others.” For everyone—including them. A society powered by fairy dust and righteous intentions quickly becomes a squalid shadow of what came before.But perhaps that’s the secret hope. That they, noble vanguards of moral purity, will be anointed as part of the select elite, sipping the last bubbles of civilized comfort while the unwashed plebs grind away in whatever grim utopia follows. A fantasy, of course—but a persistent one. It’s amazing how revolutionary fervor tends to evaporate when people realize they don’t get to be in the VIP section of the new order.