Only in DC

So I get a trip this morning going from Virginia into DC to Union Station. Traffic is fine until we get to the Roosevelt Bridge, which carries traffic from interstate 66 across the Potomac. Once across the river, it more or less dumps you on Constitution Avenue. This morning, however, we only got about halfway across before everything came to a crawl. I'm figuring it's an accident, until I notice the sea of firetrucks and police cars along Constitution. There were also a couple of TV news trucks with those big antennas thrown in for good measure. That's when I notice the banner.

There's a construction site on the NW corner of 23rd and Constitution, with the State Department on the NE corner (that's the building on the right hand side of the photo at the end of this post). There was big banner hanging from one of two big cranes. It was a picture of the planet Earth with the caption "Too big to fail." Clever, I was thinking, but why the big emergency response? That's when I noticed the two objects hanging from the bottom corners of the banner: People. Two morons were actually hanging from this damn thing.

According to the Post article (there's also a better photo of the banner), it was a protest organized by Greenpeace and timed to correspond with some sort of economic forum taking place at the State Department. The protesters were apparently hoping to draw attention to environmental needs as well.

But did they really accomplish what they wanted? People trying to get to work were left steaming in traffic. So instead of merely drawing attention to their cause, the protesters instead succeeded in pissing off a lot of people. That was certainly the case with me. In fact, I spent the rest of day throwing trash out of the car while needlessly gunning the engine.

And suppose there had been a major fire in the area? With so much rescue equipment tied up because of these idiots, not to mention the traffic jams, there would have been serious problems.

My passenger and I were fortunate in that we got through the are shortly after the protest started. I took took a different route back out of the city and met up with 66 on the other side of the Potomac. By then it looked like the traffic was backed up at least a mile. Plus, with the protest now all over the news and traffic reports, many motorists tried taking alternate routes, jamming those as well.

Did these protesters stop to think about the consequences of their actions? Aside from pissing off potential supporters, did it occur to them that all the thousands of cars forced to needlessly sit in traffic were throwing even MORE CO2 into the atmosphere? Wouldn't it be a hoot if their actions were the final push needed to finally melt the ice caps and doom the Earth?

Maybe Greenpeace should stick with saving the whales.