Sometimes it’s easy, when confronted with conflict, to turn to a narrative that most aligns with our belief system. This human tendency often puts us on one side or the other. I traveled with the People’s Convoy for four days in March to complicate the narrative around COVID-19. Mandates. Public health restrictions. Vaccines. And human beings. My time with Ben and other truckers let me learn more about this conflict and, hopefully, write a story that doesn’t fit into a blue or red mold. At Source Media Properties, we follow a set of principles that allows us to “complicate the narrative.” The goal for you, the reader, is not to change minds or beliefs or political affiliations. It’s to gain a more nuanced mindset when it comes to confronting conflict in our lives so we can treat each other with more respect.
Ben Bowman is a hugger. Not a casual one, an enthusiastic one; he’s the type of hugger who counts how many he gets in one day. One might argue he has a problem, that he’s addicted to it or even weird about it. The shoulder tap normal beings give to those we embrace, the one that universally signifies the conclusion of this particular physical contact, doesn’t work for Ben. In fact, he often ignores the shoulder tap. If you ask him, he’ll tell you it’s just who he is. In other words, he fully embraces his huggy-ness.
Ben is also one of Ohio’s more than 73,000 heavy truck drivers. He has driven heavy trucks carrying various items of commerce across state lines for 11 years. The profession runs deep in his family. He was named after his great uncle who worked for Norfolk and Western back when trains were today’s truck. His father was a trucker, too.
Ben, 36, doesn’t look like a trucker (if there’s a certain rough-and-gruff aesthetic). He has a friendly face and his prescription aviator-style glasses make his eyes appear tiny. He stands at a round 5 feet 6 inches. His voice has a meek rasp, and it is also laced with passion, often resembling the whisper someone makes when feigning a cheering crowd.
Ben is also a man of faith. He wasn’t always that way, but now that he is, he feels as if he has a lifetime of ungodliness to correct. This often manifests in an eagerness to, say, hug someone or to pray with someone for more than is typically socially acceptable. His approachable outward appearance, though, means this is rarely challenged.
And so you might ask if Ben is in the wrong industry. The job pays the bills (he said he makes around $50,000 a year, which according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is a bit higher than the average for heavy truck drivers in Ohio and nationally). But like all truckers, he sits on his bucket seat moving 60 mph over the highway for long stretches of time without being around a single soul. So who would he get to hug? Who would he pray for?
I spent around 90 hours with Ben from March 3 to 7. Ben decided weeks prior he would make the trek from Ashland, where he lives, to the Washington, D.C. area to be part of the People’s Convoy, a group of truck drivers who vowed to stand against COVID-19 restrictions and mandates.
Curious why he’d decide to do this — given the fact pandemic-related restrictions have been dropping like flies across the country since late February — I tagged along.
The People’s Convoy was inspired by the Freedom Convoy that originated in Canada in early 2022. That convoy’s objective was to end COVID-19 mandates for truckers who crossed the U.S. border but morphed into protesting general coronavirus-related restrictions.
The mission of the People’s Convoy was to make its presence known in the nation’s capital to “end the (national emergency) that led to overreaching mandates.”
From Ben’s and the thousands of truckers’ and supporters’ perspective, the pandemic-related restrictions would disappear at the end of this and freedom would ring for the American people once again. And truckers like Ben would stand proud as the fearless victors. Forever they would wear the victory as a pin on their trucker hats because, like so many before them, they stuck it to the Man.
Ben is angry. He’s angry over what he perceives as “government overreach,” which can be translated to the stripping of American liberties by the government’s effort to curb the spread of COVID-19. Like many people, he’s fed up.
He’s also scared. Scared that if he and his fellow members of the People’s Convoy don’t stand up to this overreach what that will mean for future generations of truckers and Americans and, really, everyone who calls Earth home.
He spends a lot of time talking about this on the trip, explaining his side of the story. And versions of this sentiment are expressed through other participants of the People’s Convoy, like Mike Moore.
Moore, of New London in Ashland County, is 45 and drives for Jake’s Hauling in Mansfield.
“I’ve been a trucker for 20 years,” he said, pulling a string overhead that releases an ear-piercing train horn. He laughs as a chorus of honking fills the air at the Hagerstown Speedway, a race car course about an hour northwest of Washington, D.C. Honking is a regular occurrence at the speedway, a way to build camaraderie and keep the excitement of the movement alive.
For Moore, the People’s Convoy is about fighting for the redistribution of power back to the people. He was away from home for about four days by the time he reached Hagerstown with hundreds of other truckers awaiting a trip to the D.C. Beltway to demonstrate their disapproval of public health restrictions.
Moore said he would head back to Ohio in order to start work on Monday, March 7, making his stay about five days — his family needed him to continue working for a paycheck.
Lighting a cigarette, he gets emotional when discussing his 13 year-old daughter, who likened what he was doing to a single decision a woman made back in the 1950s and that led to the Civil Rights Movement.
“She doesn’t really get why I’m doing this,” he said, tears welling in his squinty eyes, exhaling a stream of smoke into the warm March air. “But before I left she asked me if it was sorta like what Rosa Parks did on the bus. I told her, ‘yes. It’s like that. We’re sitting at the front of the bus, baby.’”
The Canadian convoy’s main thrust was fighting a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for truckers crossing U.S. and Canada borders. The private sector in the U.S. faced a vaccine requirement through President Biden’s “Plan out of the Pandemic,” announced Sept. 9. The mandate, which affected 84 million people, was later blocked by the Supreme Court.
However, federal contractors and employees, workers at health facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding and several state and local workers face vaccine mandates or weekly testing for the coronavirus, according to a chart published by Littler, a law firm.
Several states filed for injunctions on the federal vaccine requirements, which have effectively delayed the mandates’ deadlines.
Many people of the People’s Convoy support Conservative and Republican political ideals — including one of the convoy’s leaders — said the demonstration was not about politics. It was about coming together on the shared belief that the government shouldn’t dictate medical decisions, colloquially referred to as “medical freedom.”
Brian Brase, of Ohio, is one of the organizers of the People’s Convoy. One evening, in front of a cheering crowd, he said: “Those of us that are here that lean to the left and those that are here that lean to the right — and those that are independents, those who don’t affiliate with any political party — it takes the American people to stand together to get this stuff done and together we can.”
Ben didn’t face any so-called “jab or job” decisions with Dart Express, the trucking company he works for. Ben said the company’s policy regarding the COVID-19 vaccine is one of personal choice, leaving it up to drivers to get the shot or not. Still, the company, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, didn’t exactly support the People’s Convoy, or at least Ben’s part in it. His boss did not allow him to drive the company truck when he asked to drive it to D.C.
Dart Express declined to comment.
Instead, Ben took out a leave of absence from March 3 through April 3, missing five paychecks. He dipped into his personal savings to finance the trip, around $800 all said, and drove his personal Honda Pilot, which he packed full of snacks, plastic water bottles, lawn chairs and a PA system with a microphone.
He slept in the Pilot most nights, tilting the leather seat back to get sleep. (One night in Arlington, Virginia, he booked a room at a budget hotel.)
Ben supported Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. In many ways, the people of the People’s Convoy are his people, supporting many ideas he’s adopted over the years.
“The government, over the past couple years, they pushed the limits on what they can get away with before getting any pushback from the people,” Ben said.
This, the People’s Convoy, was the people’s “long overdue pushback,” he added.
In many other ways, the people of the People’s Convoy were not his people. For instance, the frequent chanting “Let’s Go Brandon” and prevalence of “F*ck Biden” flags.
“I don’t like that. It’s not really necessary and it makes us all look a certain way. It gives people who are critical of us just more ammunition to paint us all as crazy conspiracy theorists,” he said.
So who is Ben Bowman? How does he fit into the People’s Convoy? Why did he take this trip that some people back home criticized as “a waste of time?”
In Part 2, we’ll probe Ben’s life and look into some significant moments that shaped his views and ultimately led him to be part of the People’s Convoy.
