A Riot of Scolds
I am old enough to have been through a few race riots in my life. This is not one of those times. I think we are still figuring out what this is, but it sure as heck is not the uprising of a wronged community in the face of injustice. This is more like the acting out of a bunch of kids that want to tell me how the world is supposed to be and that are simply unwilling to face the fact that it is not. They seem unable to deal with the fact that some people do bad things. They seem to lack the ability to understand that justice is not perfect, it is just the best we can do. They seem more interested in scolding us than fixing the world.
Jim Geraghty described the rioting crowds this way, “But the vast majority of those were young whites, in anarchist or Antifa regalia, and young blacks and other minorities.” I watched the standoff on Fairfax Ave in Los Angeles a bit this morning, It is first of all mighty curious that a riot ostensibly about police mistreatment of an African-American is happening dead center of the Los Angeles Jewish community. The standoff featured an almost stereotypical young woman, dressed in black with backpack, reading from a manifesto of some sort standing in “no man’s land” between the rioters and the police line. In the Rodney King riots a white woman that put herself in that position, even if sympathetic with the rioters, would have been dead in a matter of seconds. This is no race riot.
What follows are a few random thoughts on current events.
Messaging. Rioting and looting is an expected response to the announcement of the impending apocalypse. The pandemic has been presented to us from many quarters, certainly in the press and from some local officials, in apocalyptic terms. We have heard about the “new normal” until I am just sick of the term. Does that term not imply the unravelling of the old order? Is that not an apocalypse of a sort? Is it really surprising that people would want to pick the bones of the “old normal?”
Maybe people really do think of the pandemic in apocalyptic terms and that we are now in the all out war that must decide who gets to rebuild civilization? I certainly would not blame young people raised in their bedrooms with a steady diet of zombie flicks and social media for thinking so. When we shut down we were told there were going to be millions of dead – Millions! I was almost expecting bodies in the street as families tossed out the near dead in an effort to save themselves from advancing plague. Suddenly, this was no longer funny.
Rhetoric matters, far more than we would like to think sometimes. While social media has had the undeniable tendency to ramp up our rhetoric to eleven, those in power and those that are supposed to responsibly report have an obligation to control and manage their rhetoric. But alas.
Lawlessness. Heather MacDonald has a very interesting piece about the collapse of the rule of law evident in the riots. I always thought that was the definition of a riot. She calls this a “pandemic of civil violence,” but I think she misses the real connections here. The rule of law has been eroding for some time now. As oft discussed in the Hillsdale Hour, the “administrative state” with its ability to regulate without much public accountability results in much law that seems arbitrary. Once the law becomes arbitrary it begins to lose its hold. The Obama Administration’s extraordinary reliance on the administrative state has resulted in a generation, perhaps two, for whom the law seems an almost entirely arbitrary thing.
But we reached a lawless nadir of sorts in this pandemic crisis. “Rules” came out of nowhere and disappeared into oblivion with the speed of Mercury. Lone surfers were arrested when they clearly presented to danger to public health. Governors shut down beaches in clear fits of pique, despite precautions for public health and safety. Jewish funerals were raided and shutdown mid-stream, echoing police states I have known. Our governments acted hastily and randomly, creating chaos, not order. Our governments, which are supposed to embody law, instead made it appear entirely capricious.
Rioting is indeed a lawless act. MacDonald has that absolutely correct. But then in recent weeks the law has appeared a very fluid and unreliable thing. That the populace would therefore act outside of its normal boundaries seems hardly surprising.
Organization. Make no mistake, there is organization behind what is happening in the streets. The bricks are coming from somewhere. Things of this nature rarely happen without agitation of some sort. Geraghty, as linked above, links to at least on group organizing on Reddit. Someone is taking advantage of the circumstances created by the pandemic. I don’t know who and I do not want to speculate, but it is clear someone is acting with intent. That scares me far more than the rioting and looting itself.
In the race riots of my past while I have always been abhorred by the violence, I have always felt a certain sympathy for the rioters themselves. Presented with injustice they acted in what they perceived to be the only option left to them. But I can find no such sympathy in this mess, despite trying. These gullible kids are clearly being duped. Whoever is doing the duping is a clear-cut enemy and the kids should not be that gullible. Shame is due to us older folk for producing kids that are so gullible.
https://www.hughhewitt.com/a-riot-of-scolds/
No comments:
Post a Comment