Originally posted on Sunday July 14, 2024.
One of the primary lessons I have learned after many years on social media is that it never hurts to wait before commenting. Waiting is usually the right choice. The wise choice.
Example: Within minutes of yesterday’s shooting, one of my Facebook “friends,” deeply mired in the Trump cult, took to my page to rage about “the liberal wacko,” “the liberal moron,” who, provoked by the “violent” rhetoric from the left, tried to assassinate Trump.
Then we wait.
Then it turns out the young man is a Republican. Who gave $15 to a Democratic Get-Out-the-Vote group. With a Libertarian father. A Democratic mother. And an AR-15.
And we are reminded again that there is wisdom in waiting. It’s a profile that raises more questions than answers. So maybe wise to wait for those answers.
I might suggest that the operative term here is “young” man. A young man, barely out of high school. A young man with easy access to an AR-15. If we’ve learned anything over the past few decades, it’s that young men with easy access to high-powered weapons is a recipe for disaster.
So, perhaps, addressing that issue might be a wise place to start. Or would that be politicizing the event?
Perhaps one additional point. A story I once heard from an evangelical preacher.
Mike’s father was a preacher. As it happened, his father’s marriage crumbled, and he got a divorce. The evangelical congregation he had led for decades promptly threw him out.
When Mike sought to comfort his father, his father said, “It’s not their fault, Mike. I taught them to hate. They’re just doing what I taught them to do.”
Republicans are already seeking to pin blame for teaching hate on Democrats. But it’s not the Democratic candidate who tours the country promoting violence, calling for executions of his enemies, mocking the brutal hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, calling for shoplifters to be shot in the back, endorsing the violence of January 6, referring to half of Americans as “vermin” and “scum.”
It’s not Democratic leaders who constantly speak of Civil War.
Whomever this young man turns out to be, it has always been extraordinarily naïve of Trump and MAGA world to think that they can open the lid of Pandora’s box and control the creatures that slither out. Because the creatures that crawl out from that dark place care not a bit for our motives. Our causes. Even our right and wrong. They simply love death. And before we manage to return them from whence they came, they will, without fail, get what they came for.
Or, to switch metaphors, it is folly to assume the chickens will always roost in your neighbor’s yard. Eventually some will come home to roost …