The US Social Forum has left Detroit: Good Riddance

The United States Social Forum has come and gone from the City of Detroit. It is fair to ask whether anyone outside of local reporters even noticed. They can be forgiven their interest, however slight. It is their job to seek out the unusual.

Unusual it was, this leftist gabfest which graced our burg with its presence this past week. Without much money to actually stay in places of comfort (they're called hotels, BTW, all you social forum participants; the common folk employ them regularly) they put up tents where they were welcome. One such sight, next to a church, was made up of crowded old nylon bags virtually atop one another, dirty and aged.

The crowning glory of their stay was a protest at a small park near the Detroit Incinerator, upon which they marched afterwards. This was not a nonpartisan affair, despite what some have alleged. It was quite partisan, in fact: one speaker ended his harangue against the world with that cliched old, 'Power to the People!" catch phrase. Another asserted, quite seriously, that pollution was 'racist'. A third railed about crimes against nature. You get the point.

Crimes against nature? It is no crime against a tree to cut down the tree. It may be a crime against a landowner if it is his tree, or a crime against God if down wantonly, but the tree has no moral obligation towards anyone. There can be no crime against it.

Pollution is racist? Of all the human ills in the world (and there are human ills, only generally not of the type the Social Forumers decry) pollution seems the most color and gender blind of them all.

There were speakers from the inner city of Chicago and the coal fields of West Virginia and the public employees unions of North Carolina. These are not people with the interests of Detroit in mind. They are roving semi-professional rabble rousers, seeking only to take down da man. What they would do after he is deposed, well, judging by the list of participants, The Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor, for example, a look at the history of the old Soviet Union, not to mention a taste of Maoist China or Tiananmen Square, would likely offer us a satisfactory pre-knowledge of such a result.

The Social Forum, in short, was simply a gathering of aging old socialists who can't believe the sixties have passed them by, and younger radicals radical because it's cool. They are not to be taken seriously.

It began to drizzle as they started their march towards the incinerator. They probably assumed it was acid rain sent by the corporate interests to bring their cause down. It would make sense, in a certain vein: only the paranoid recognize paranoia fully.