The “People’s Convoy” of angry truckers has seen a huge dropoff in its participants in the weeks since reaching Washington D.C., and what began as a protest against COVID-19 restrictions has turned into a general malaise of vague right-wing grievances.
Those who remain, though, are facing some challenges. Challenges like … having to pee their pants.
The Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo shared that according to co-organizer and trucker Ron Coleman, the truck drivers who have been circling the D.C. Beltway haven’t been able to “go to the bathroom” during their meaningless protest, which has left “people hav[ing] actually pissed their pants!”
You would think that long-haul truckers would already have some sort of solution for this problem but apparently not! They’re being forced to pee themselves and the only answer they’ve come up with is to try to arrest Washington D.C.’s Mayor Muriel Bowser and the police.
Coleman told Petrizzo, “We have to put a summons out to the Metro PD and Mayor Bowser … we would do citizen’s arrests [of] them.”
Just to be clear, these truckers drove across the country to protest COVID-19 restrictions which largely don’t even exist anymore, and while engaging in the form of protest they chose, they’re having trouble accessing restrooms, so the only solution is to do a “citizen’s arrest” on the police and mayor? Sure, makes as much sense as anything else they’ve put themselves behind.
Petrizzo says that “Over the past week, there has been a growing fascination with the prospects of arresting DC residents. Some truckers have also suggested that they could arrest a Beltway driver if they successfully pin in the driver, take them out of their car, and then conduct an arrest.”
There have been reports of truckers boxing in cars on the Capital Beltway—which is a freeway that loops around the city—in response to drivers flipping them off or simply trying to merge. Petrizzo even reported that in at least one case about a week ago, this caused an argument among the truckers as to whether boxing in a driver is illegal.
“You can’t block somebody in like that,” a trucker who’s been live-streaming the convoy told his fellow participants. “That’s considered abduction. The person in the car has the right to go bang bang and shoot you!” Instead, he said they should have conducted a “citizen’s arrest” on the driver, whose alleged offense appeared to be brake-checking the truckers.
Of course, if the truckers also want to arrest the police, it’s not clear who they plan to surrender their prisoners to once they have conducted their definitely illegal “citizen’s arrests.” Logic, like bladders and bicycles, seems to be a weak point for this convoy.
(image: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
