It’s not funny, my husband insisted. You can’t condone doing bad things just because someone else is doing bad things.

He’s right. But… I still laughed. I’d only read a description of it and it sounded hilarious. I told him, Bullies only understand being stood up to and some form of that has needed to happen.

And now there’s video.

There’s an Assemblywoman in the East Bay who proposed a bill that would protect women so they couldn’t be charged for having a stillbirth, a miscarriage, or even, for that matter, an abortion. Roe v Wade is still the law of the land and will continue to be in our state.

My older sister and I have had miscarriages, mine at the 12-week mark. My younger sister had a stillborn son. All of those potential children were very wanted, but biology is messy and uneven and sometimes just plain random. The idea that going to the hospital for the 20 hours labor I went through for mine could put me in jail for something I didn’t want to have happen to me–and that happened to someone in Missouri and would it surprise anyone that she was Latina?–I mean, what are you going to do, slap handcuffs on G_d?

So. The truckers’ convoy that ran out of their mask mandate to protest against decided to drive all the way from DC to honk their horns here for hours, first in my town last week to try to intimidate our county public health leader who was receiving an award for having kept the covid rate the lowest in the country with her early lockdown despite our having some of the earliest cases and dense population; conveniently, that ceremony was happening at the local Jewish Community Center. Anti-Semitism! A two-fer! Then across the Bay to threaten and intimidate that Assemblywoman. I don’t think they would have done it to a man, but a woman, now, she needed to know her place–and her, too.

They actually had My Body My Choice written on some of their trucks. Because wearing a mask is so much more intrusive than a state telling you you have to die of an ectopic pregnancy.

Daily Kos says their reporter managed to snag a copy of the requirements on the participating truckers: they get reimbursed for all this gas they’re wasting but only if they turn the receipt for it in right away and in person, not by mail. Whoever’s funding them is determined to control them by keeping them together.

I wonder if they realize they have become the Westboro Baptist Trucks.

Now, anyone who knows anything about Oakland knows the traffic is terrible.

School let out.

There was a Safeway right where the truckers were being obnoxious and tying up traffic even worse and blowing their stupid horns. The police were not ticketing them for that horn use, they were not ticketing them for driving in residential areas, but they also didn’t ticket the pedestrian who walked in front of a truck and stood there in the street, basically a you block us we’ll block you.

First it was just middle fingers and yelling against the honking. (The guy in the middle of the street simply plugged his ears.)

Then someone bought that first carton of eggs.

Safeway had lots of eggs.

A woman walking by with a pizza she’d clearly just picked up took in the scene, went, yeah. Yeah I’d like an egg for those guys, thanks, and waited for the right moment because the truckers had sped up a bit now and clearly she didn’t want to waste this on bad aim. She nailed it.

And for the protection of those drivers’ good health she kept her mask on, as a polite person does.

At one or two points it was like a fireworks of exploding egg shells rising above the tops of the trucks. One guy rolled his window down so they could hear him better while he was yelling at them. Right on his shirt. He got out of his truck like an earlier guy had done to intimidate a woman, but there were a lot more people now and all those teens had joined in–he saw those arms drawn back to have a second go at him and quickly thought the better of it.

It worked. They hightailed it out of here. Wonder if their hidden source will reimburse them for those paint repair jobs.