A Real-Time Societal Unraveling

A new twist on the silly season

There is an especially virulent toxin infecting the body politic in America - the habit of judging events by who was involved rather than by what happened. This indicates a nation’s moral calculus going awry, of the aberrant being normalized, and of a values system in dire need of recalibration. The silly season used to refer to media outlets publishing about the absurd, the outlandish, and the light-hearted because more serious matters were taking a holiday. Today, it means something entirely different.

In recent months, a health insurance CEO was murdered on a city street, two Israeli embassy employees were executed in cold blood, a brand of vehicle was targeted for mindless vandalism and arson, riots erupted between masked malcontents and law enforcement agents, and over the weekend, politically inspired assassinations happened in Minnesota. As if to make my point, the following question appeared on a social platform I sometimes frequent:

What would make some conservatives interested in linking Gov. Tim Walz to the Minnesota lawmakers' shootings?

The answer to this question is obvious. Interest among conservatives in linking this to Walz is identical to the left’s desire to link similar acts to Republican actors. Remember when the word of the day, week, and month for what seemed like years was ‘insurrection,’ or when the greatest threat to the republic was disenchanted parents who attended school board meetings?

Blind partisanship has outpaced reason, judgment, and basic human compassion. Partisanship does not care about the victims involved; it focuses exclusively on whatever perceived political advantage exists. The thinking goes like this: if the other side can be blamed for a horrific fact, then my side can pretend to occupy the moral high ground.

As we have covered before, more than once, what has unfolded over the past several months was more predictable than surprising. It’s not okay to kill people over political differences. That should go without saying. That it must be said is a tragedy in its own right. Worse, it must be repeated because there will be more stupidity, in part because the price for being stupid remains far too low.

Rabble-rousers need to face serious, life-changing consequences; otherwise, they are undeterred. The LA Mayor and CA Governor wanted to let the violence run wild during the ICE protests, so they portrayed Trump as the bad guy for wanting to restore order. Their supporters justified the violence by insisting that it was confined to a small portion of LA, as if right or wrong is determined by volume. Murder is confined to a small portion of the population, too, but we don’t give it a free pass. Well, at least not most of the time.

California and other states became consequence-free zones in 2020 when, first, police were told to stand down, and later, when the residual crime wave swamped one large city after another and prosecutors refused to act. We have all seen the videos of the roach-like mobs looting and trashing places, or the ones with someone being assaulted, or random brawls in unlikely places.

What happened in Minnesota is one more snapshot of the time. The suspect was a Walz appointee; does that make the governor a proponent of murder? The suspect is also said to be a pro-lifer; does that indict every other person who holds that view? Tim Walz is a self-made target by his lack of a mute button or a filter. However, focusing on him misses the point, which is that far more energy will be spent on political gamesmanship than on recognizing the potential implications.

Without a touch of irony, the people who were all for you being locked inside for months, all for grandma dying alone in a care home, and all for people who refused a shot to lose their jobs, spent part of the weekend pretending to be anti-authoritarian. I’m still waiting to find out just who is pushing the monarchy that protesters claim to oppose, while also wondering where their manufactured angst was when a past president was connected to imperial desires.

That was (D)ifferent, of course, in much the same way that a president who ran on an anti-war platform with promises to stop two conflicts may be complicit in triggering a third. Here, too, tribalism rules the day. I’m not in favor of more wars; I am beyond convinced that Israel’s attack on Iran includes several potential nasty consequences, not the least of those being a far wider conflict. For that bit of temerity, I was accused of being a leftist, an ayatollah apologist, and a host of other emotion-driven insults masquerading as arguments.

Part of the argument was how, once again, Iran is within weeks, maybe days or even minutes, of going nuclear. Glen Greenwald did the work and found out these apocalyptic warnings date back 40 years. This particular war itch is one that many, too many, in Congress have been eager to scratch for some time, as if removing the regime in Tehran will work better than ousting or killing rulers in Iraq, Libya, and Syria did. The people in favor of further action purposely forget that our track record in this sort of endeavor is not very good.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions regarding the Middle East, Ukraine, dealing with illegal immigration domestically, and the increasingly unhinged nature of political discourse. But they are not entitled to their own facts. And the fact is that not nearly enough people are condemning violence on the home front irrespective of political leanings. Where I live in the Southeast, it is commonly accepted that the Antifa types would not dare do here what they do on the West Coast. The resident liberals, progressives, and leftists understand that, just as many on the right understand that there is a very short distance between unhinged rhetoric and some fool putting those words into action.

This topic is starting to become a theme; it has been the subject of multiple articles thus far, and it is more likely than not that others will follow. Perhaps it boils down to the single greatest source of power among humans, a subject that is not pleasant to discuss or acknowledge. It is not opposable thumbs, it is not having empathy or wanting to help one’s fellow people, and it is not the ability to reason.

It is the capacity to use violence. Numerous terrors of the past were made possible by this capacity and the willingness to deploy it. Sometimes, violence is necessary, but we are getting a bit cavalier not just about using it, but also about convincing ourselves that it is being done for noble purposes when our side is involved.