Blowback

 

Over at The Captain's Journal back on August 16, 2020, a poster going by "Ol' Remus" opined:

Middle class America is no less violent than any other people.   They seem passive because they’re results-oriented.   They rise not out of blood frenzy but to solve the otherwise insoluble.   Their methods of choice are good will, cooperation, forbearance, negotiation and finally, appeasement, roughly in that order.   Only when these fail to end the abuse do they revert to blowback.   And they do so irretrievably.   Once the course is set and the outcome defined, doubt is put aside.   The middle class is known — condemned, actually — for carrying out violence with the efficiency of an industrial project where bloody destruction at any scale is not only in play, it’s a metric.   Remorse is left for the next generation; they’ll have the leisure for it.   We’d like to believe this is merely dark speculation.   History says it isn’t.

Last night, Donald Trump became the most assassinated President in history.   Unsurprisingly, leftist social media is ablaze with (a) regrets that the assassin was unsuccessful and urging the next one (!) to get more range-time, and/or (b) claims that this was just another Trumpian publicity stunt designed to garner popular sentiment for a failing administration.

For those on 'the left', political violence is a rheostat.   It can be set low or set high or set to any point between, and they believe this is universally true.   It's not.   For those on 'the right', political violence is a simple switch.   Its present setting is 'off'.

I quote Ol' Remus above because I believe we are inching ever closer to the moment when some unsuspecting fool actor will accidentally flip that switch.   What will follow, I cannot speculate, but I suspect 'unpleasant' will be far too mild an adjective, and 'due process' will be largely determined by the contents of one's social media profile.

If I were a Democrat, I would be worrying, and I would be actively cooling my rhetoric, trying to 'get ahead of the curve', but that would only happen were I a sane Democrat, and there are damned few of those.