One of the scariest things about our times is how easy it is to scare people and start a political stampede. There are people who could be upset if they were told that half of all Americans earn less than the median income—though of course that is the way median income is defined
I’m reminded of the petition some smart ass got people to sign calling for the abolition of the use of Dihydrogen Oxide in human food preparation, even though that is just an unusual way of describing the structure of water.
It would seem many Americans feel that when they being are manipulated, it is bad form for the rest of us not to join them.
Individualism, as a creed, was in my understanding a part of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and is arguably the single most useful historical corrective to this coercive, irrational, and really primitive behavior.
Mobs are nothing new. What is new–or was new, take your pick–was the protection of ideosyncratic and unpopular views by the people who control the police power of the State.
Lynch mobs are not new. Police protecting the people the mob wants to lynch–even when the person ordering them there personally does not agree with them either–that is the innovation that helped create the freest, most just nation ever to exist on this planet, at least to this extent and at this scale.
Get rid of police, empower mobs. Empower mobs, you empower collective stupidity, criminality, and completely pointless and avoidable violence. None of the math on this is very hard.
And I would comment that much of the reason white people are not indulging their impulses to go crack heads is that this is OUR system. We built it. We created the legal space to include people not like us. We did that because we were convinced by logic and reason–which our culture values and elevates to a high level of honor and respect–that it was the right thing to do.
If the system collapses, if we see massed battles in the streets, we all lose. Nobody really wins, except those who love chaos for its own sake, and those who hate this nation. Effectively, Antifa and those like them HAVE in effect declared themselves enemies of America.
Over and above the legal and moral problems with using violence, I think many people get intuitively that if the shooting ever starts, something fundamentally good about this nation will be damaged permanently. This is not North versus South. This is neighbor versus neighbor. None of us want a civil war fought at Walmart.
I will guarantee a lot of guns have been cleaned and recleaned over the past few weeks. I guarantee many people got in some range time, and bought yet more ammunition.
But we are not seeing those people on the streets yet, and I hope we never do. I hope our leaders do the right things, for the right reasons.
One final note: I watched the Swedish movie “The Girl who kicked over the hornet’s nest”. In it, there is a breakaway, compartmentalized cabal working for the Secret Police that, in the end, is arrested by honest government operatives.
Until we start seeing people like Hillary Clinton–and probably Joe Biden, who pretty clearly did do the act for which Trump was impeached–in handcuffs, nobody who is paying attention is going to relax.