Assault (here’s what betraying your country looks like).
My first run-in with the P***d B***s. At this point in January 2019, I had no idea who they were. So I went over and asked. Three of them educated me on what they were, as various iterations of the flag dipped and brushed the ground. They carefully avoided making any reference or inference to white supremacy or race in general; merely expressing their support for the flag and what it stands for.
I pressed and pushed; something I may have been more cautious about had I realized at the time their enthusiasm for aggression and violent tactics as the easiest way to ejaculate their hate; hate euphemized as nationalism, patriotism, and masculinity.
I rejected - respectfully - their position as it became clear what they really stood for, and ejected myself from the area. And then went on to have a short dialog with a black father and son who had been looking on from a short distance away in an unnamed coffee shop. The late-teenager was trembling - literally trembling - with rage at their brazen attempt to cast themselves as American heroes. “Bunch of pussies carrying a flag around, they got no right.”
“They have a right,” his father reminded him. “They have a right to be there. I hate it. I hate it too son.”
The ‘P’ word I choose to use is ‘pathetic.’
Pathetic. These grown men, shuffling around, carrying a flag that symbolizes so much - yet what have they chosen to have it represent?
A pathetic version of masculinity. A pathetic and mistaken vision of America. A pathetic attempt to divide. A pathetic representation of America’s worst.
And here’s the really pathetic thing: as individuals, maybe some of, or all of these fellows are decent human beings. They’re not beyond redemption. But somewhere, sometime, something developed in them that led them to point fingers instead of join hands; to blame others instead of looking at their own hearts, and to choose aggression and violence over listening and meaningful dialog.
Deeply saddening. Deeply pathetic.
Homo sum humani, nihil a mi alienum puto.
We are all capable of great evil. Or of great goodness.
Choose.
Consider.
From a human perspective, is a police officer’s life more valuable than an ordinary citizen’s?
No.
But from a societal perspective, it is considered an act against all of us to take an officer’s life. It violates at the worst level the framework we have set up to protect everyone. Everyone. So from a societal perspective, to murder a police officer is different than the murder of a citizen. It is treated differently. The death of a law enforcement officer and the death of “an ordinary citizen” are both horrific, and they may both be deeply painful to those around. But from a SOCIETAL perspective, we have understood the murder of an officer to be egregious and harmful to the extreme. Largely because of, I think, the symbolism and what it says when someone willfully takes the life of someone sworn by society to protect. It feels like a particular type of violation that is not simply an attack on an individual, but an attack on ourselves collectively.
The deaths of many out of uniform “ordinary citizens” also have the power to galvanize; to be the catalyst for something beyond a single incident or person and become a transforming catalyst for change. This is not that conversation today.
But, but, but…
Already seeing equivocations about the rioting, coup d’etat, insurrection, assault...choose your word - about the breaching of the Capitol while Congress prepared to take its sworn step in the next stage of our democratic process.
The next step in a process that we have gone through again and again. It’s always sad for some one cycle, and another in another cycle, because it’s always binary. There’s a winner and there’s a loser. And the loser, at a certain point, has conceded. Something Trump has vowed he will never do - long before this election.
So when people riot in neighborhoods and business districts and downtowns...it is not right. It is wrong.
Today is not a “this or that” scenario.
Protest v. riot.
Is rioting, in and of itself, wrong? Well, without equivocating too much, yes. Wrong. Like it’s wrong to murder someone. Citizen or law enforcement.
What has happened today - IS happening today - is the latter. It is not simply an extension of “...well, now it’s the other side rioting, so now things are even.”
No.
No.
Inspired and enabled by the current President’s words and actions, they violated a sacrosanct process in elections. Elections that have inspired across the world for decades and been a mind blowing example of how peaceful transfer of power works.
Which means the loser accepts a loss.
The assault on the Capitol is different. It’s not “just rioting.”
It is an assault on who America is and what we claim to represent.
There are those who have stood up; who will stand up.
And there are those who continue to make excuses, to defend, to reach for any possible reasons to defend the indefensible and explain how attacking the nation’s Capitol is actually patriotism.
It’s not. It’s an attack, and it’s not “just” an assault on a building.
Or on a few people.
Or on officers defending the Capitol.
It’s an assault on the system that has made America America.
It is an assault on all of us.
——
