What do you do when no one will listen to you? Nowadays, if you try to make a controversial point online, and “Big Tech” says that you are trying to spread “misinformation” and deletes you article and your accounts, taking to the streets is the only option you have left. Here are some peaceful protests that have worked throughout history.

In early 1800s India, British rulers made it illegal for Indians to produce their own salt, as well as heavily taxed the imported salt from England. There were many attempts to overturn the tax and break up the English monopoly on the vital mineral, but it was Mahatma Gandhi who led the first movement that gained any sort of traction.

In March, 1930, Gandhi and his followers made a 240-mile trek to the Indian coast and when they got there, they all reached down and gathered up their own salt. In typical tyrant fashion, over 60,000 people, including Gandhi, were arrested and put in jail.

The trek was handled non-violently and there were no reports of “mostly harmless” riots with pictures of the city burning in the background. As the world looked on, the sympathies of the world started supporting the people of India instead of the British.

Just a few decades before, in 1913, the U.S. Women’s Suffrage movement held the first large political march on Washington for political purposes. Just before Wilson’s inauguration, between 5,000 and 10,000 thousand women gathered together to pressure the government to allow women to participate in politics and to be treated as citizens of the U.S. They were trying to prove that you can be beautiful and smart and deserved the ability to vote.

It was a cold winter in 1913, and rumors of the beds being extra cold in the D.C. area were going around.

50 years later, Martin Luther King Jr., a follower of Gandhi and a lot of his beliefs, “Had a Dream”. He held the 1963 March on Washington where over 200,000 demonstrators gathered peacefully around the Lincoln Memorial; all he asked, was to “follow the science” – that “all men (and women) were created equal.”

Here we are today in 2022, with our brothers and sisters in the north (Canadians) have the stereotypical identity of being “polite” – the meme of a violent protest in Canada is a middle-aged man holding a sign that states, in no uncertain terms, “I’m a little Upset” or “I am so angry; I MADE A SIGN!” So it was in amazement, in the middle of January, that a large protest took place that involved thousands of people on both sides of the border.

The protest was a reaction to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates for truckers traveling into the country from the United States — no vaccine, no entry. Estimates at the time expected as many as 32,000 of the 160,000 cross-country truck drivers would have been affected by the mandate.

It didn’t matter if you have already had COVID and had natural antibodies in your system; If you didn’t show “your papers” you were not getting back into your own country. If you chose to remain unvaccinated, you would have to stay in a hotel room for two weeks to prove you were clean. Most truckers do not have the ability to make a living by sitting on their tushes for that long every time they cross the border.

Hence, the “Freedom Convoy 2022” – Tamara Lich and Benjamin Dichter, who were not long-haul truckers, came up with the idea of a convoy of trucks as a peaceful protest that would travel across Canada and head to Ottawa to “get rid of the vaccine mandates and the (vaccine) passports,” Dichter said. “That passport, that’s the really concerning one.”

Long haul truckers on both sides of the border started to join the movement. Lots of other people also showed up with their cars, pickups, and family vans. Most all of the main entrances between the U.S. and Canada ended up with hundreds and thousands of participants. They formed long lines going into the country, or going into the Capitol in Ottawa, and in some cases, they just parked. And now for the horror – the drama, the unmitigated gall – they honked their horns!

There were reports of the peacefulness of the protestors. There were several stories of local Canadian police that was talking to the truckers and several of them donated to the cause. The mainstream media got on the bandwagon when some of the protestors took a statue of a local hero and cancer research activist, Terry Fox and decorated it with some Confederate flags and other graffiti – didn’t pull it down, or damage it, but put graffiti and a Confederate flag on it. The thing that wasn’t broadcast was that other truckers cleaned it up afterwards.

To help pay for the food and the fuel and expenses of the protestors, people contributed to the crowd-sourcing site GoFundMe – in a couple days, the fundraiser gathered over $8 million, but the vast majority of that money was held back by the website when it determined the fundraiser “violat[ed] its terms of service” and started refunding donors.

Supporters then turned to GiveSendGo, another crowd-funding site, and raised another $16 million. But the Canadian government had other ideas, and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice froze those funds from going to truckers.

The situation got nastier: Police began confiscating fuel, and arresting people who were bringing fuel and other essentials to the truckers. To frustrate officers, supporters started walking around with fuel cans full of water.

Trudeau and the government also enacted the never-before-used Emergencies Act to freeze trucker bank accounts and suspend all donations flowing to the convoy, and ordered insurance companies to drop policies on participating vehicles.

What, exactly, was the emergency? Surely, the honking horns weren’t that bad.

Weeks into the protest, Ontario (where Ottowa is located) announced it would lift its COVID-19 proof-of-vaccination mandate in two weeks — not because of the protests, the premier said, but because “it is safe to do so.”

I am sure that it is only a coincidence.

The truckers disbanded in late February, seemingly having scored at least a partial victory by pressuring the region to lift local vaccine mandates.

Sometimes you have to do something out of the ordinary to get people to pay attention to you. Doing so peacefully is a good thing. Standing up for what you believe in is a good thing.

The important thing is to not just be a “sheeple” – get involved, talk to friends and neighbors, try and make a difference.