Stop Driving

The summer of 2022 was brutally hot in Milan. The heat trapped between the buildings and a strange quiet. The taxis had disappeared, in fact drivers of all kinds, from trains to farm tractors had simply stopped on summer Friday afternoon.

Within two days the Prime Minister resigned. I had seen protests all over the world by then. Marches, occupations, demonstrations, riots, elections. None of them exerted power the way this did.

They didn’t attack anybody or destroy anything. They possessed something much more powerful. They controlled movement.

That weekend changed the way I understood power. We are taught to look for power in presidents, parliaments, protests, armies, banks and billionaires. But every modern economy rests on a much simpler assumption: tomorrow morning, the drivers will drive.

The whole machine of our lives depends upon people willing to drive….trucks, taxis, trains, buses, planes. I thought about Milan again this week as American diesel exploded to more than $6 a gallon — a direct result of the US decision to attack Iran for no apparent reason. (People in the US blaming the Ukraine conflict, which has been going on for years, is a way to deflect responsibility from our own government decisions.)

The result is arriving at American truck stops and in the price of everything that moves in the form of massive price spikes

. The people being handed this bill possess far more leverage than most of us understand.

A demonstration asks the government to listen.

An election asks politicians to change. A driver controls something more immediate.

The truck can cost half a million dollars. A corporation can own ten thousand of them. Wall Street can finance them. Artificial intelligence can optimize their routes. Washington can regulate them.

None of those things can make a truck move.

A human being still has to turn the key. That is what I witnessed in Italy. It remains the most powerful example of nonviolent leverage I have ever seen.

Nothing had to be burned. Nobody had to be attacked.

The power came from something much simpler.

The economy required movement. The drivers controlled movement.

Today we are absorbing an extraordinary diesel shock amid a war of choice that has effectively closed one of the most important energy arteries on Earth for no good reason.

The lesson from Milan has never left me. We spend enormous amounts of time asking who has power. The answer is sitting right in front of us.

Behind the wheel.