A few weeks ago I went through the drive-thru of a local fast food burger joint. Fast food is a rare event these days, but when I indulge, I know exactly what I want. A small group of left-wing activists knew exactly what they wanted, too, when several of them went through the drive-thru of a Starbucks in Milwaukee. YouTuber and freelance writer Peter Coffin released a video on his YouTube channel this week showing them demanding an end to the violence in Gaza (one woman actually ordered, “an end to genocide, please”). They were making these demands to the worker at the drive-thru station, an individual who’s so far away from the levers of power that he or she might as well live on the moon. There’s no reason to suspect these activists were suffering from delusion, so how do we account for this strange event? How could a person, or a small group of people, engage in such behavior without red-faced shame?
It’s reasonable to assume the activists might’ve believed that by going through the drive-thru and placing demands on the workers to end the conflict in Gaza, that the workers in turn would place demands on the owners. As Coffin seems to suggest, in the minds of these political activists, effecting change is the same as ordering whatever overpriced swamp-water that particular establishment sells. And moreover, because Americans are conditioned from a young age to consider themselves consumers (and nowadays, increasingly as brands marketing and selling themselves) first and foremost, it’s right to have some measure of charity for the activists. Buying and selling aren’t merely tasks one performs to support their material lives, they’re the end-all-be-all of all domains of life itself. But charity can only extend so far when one tries to imagine the experience of the wage-slave, compelled by circumstances beyond his or her control to endure the drivel from a collection of self-absorbed ideologues.
I’m somewhat bewildered by the event, though it is not completely beyond my realm of experience. Back in the early-2000s, Protestant Christians (mostly Baptists) would dine-in at the Pizza King in Connersville, Indiana on Sunday afternoons. Though I was a delivery driver there, sometimes staffing would be short and I’d have to take up the slack in the dining room. Church people are generally affable sorts, but they like to proselytize. So in addition to tending to their dining needs, I’d sit through their sermons—perhaps about salvation, or the second coming—patiently waiting for them to finish speaking, to which I’d often respond with an “Amen” or a “praise Jesus!” (depending on the urgency with which said church person “witnessed” to me), despite the fact that I’d essentially lost my religion at that time, the Catholicism I was born into.
That didn’t matter to me. What mattered was getting them to finish speaking as soon as possible so that I could clear their table, fetch them another helping of breadsticks or hot wings, or goof off with my co-workers. It didn’t matter to them either, because I was a servant. One makes demands of servants. One talks to them. One doesn’t ask servants their opinions. In the case of the activists at the Starbucks drive-thru, and the church people in Connersville all those years ago, what they really wanted was the workers to serve them a steaming hot cup of validation. These people wanted to feel like they’d done something about the events in Gaza, so they disrupted the day of their social inferiors because they could.
What did the Starbucks employees think about this disruption? Were the workers who were subjected to an ear assault supporters of the Palestinians or the Israelis, or generally indifferent to the team sports that passes for serious political discourse these days? Were any of them Jewish? Muslim? Were they listening intently to the speeches, or drifting off into a daydream?
No one knows. And maybe, more to the point, no one really cares. But I’d guess that at least some of them wish only to clock in and do a good job (or at least a competent job, to avoid getting fired). And while world events are often tragic and heartbreaking, when have they not been? We might reason that there’s nothing individuals can do about the horrors of life that afflict this or that part of the world at intervals throughout history. So instead, we move forward and do the best we can with what we have. Maybe we nurture some secret passion, or seek to foster healthy and respectful relationships with our fellows, in the hope that as we slip into dotage and obsolescence, we can arrive at the grave with some measure of dignity and peace of mind.