Sunday, September 06, 2009

Go stand on a highway

I saw a demonstration of environmentalists today.

It made me feel like buying a car. Not because I am a contrarian bitch, although I do have those moments, but simply because I wanted to get home and the fuckers filled pretty much the whole width of Aleksanterinkatu and the trams weren't moving.

Downtown Helsinki has enough open space for people to demonstrate without blocking all the traffic in some particular place. For some reason every time I see a demonstration blocking all the traffic it's either the environmentalists or the "youths" supporting some squatters. Even the "peace marchers" with Hezbollah flags and t-shirts saying "bomb Israel" had the decency to let the trams through. The environmentalist cause is apparently too important for worrying about the mundane things like the reasonably smooth running of public transportation.

Also for some reason they tend to demonstrate right in the places where a lot of trams run (oh well, the places where the trams are supposed to run and usually do when the environmentalists are not there blocking the traffic). Has anyone ever heard of environmentalists demonstrating against the climate change on Kehä III? Me neither.

Not that I would really want them to block the traffic there either, but at least it would be more consistent than blocking the public transportation in the center of the city.

Could it be that they find it difficult to get there without cars? Maybe the effort of doing so would teach them why people who live there usually own cars in the first place.

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