What is gained?

Featured image by Pom’. Follow for more of this artist’s work.

What is gained by rioting? What is accomplished in using force to occupy a space or cause destruction? Seriously? What positive effect results from the Pro-Trump rally turned protest turned riot. Several years ago, there was a group that prevented Ben Shapiro from speaking at a college campus, when they were asked about freedom of speech, the answer from one of the attendees was “I don’t care.”

What we’re beginning to see is that sentiment seep into the general discussion over the fallout from this event. I could get into comparable with the BLM riots over the summer, but those arguments tend to turn off people who supported them and quickly turns the conversation into an argument, riddled with accusations of fascism and racism, and therefore not a discussion at all.

What is gained when we turn against each other? What is gained when we try to generalize who is responsible for the storming of a building? What is gained trying to purge the system of thought? I’ve joked with people before, saying that 1984 was written as a warning, not a road map. And yet, here we are. Parler has been removed from hosting by Google, accounts tied to organizations and people who were in the capital in support of Trump have been ousted, and people are clamoring to build lists of names to tie people to the insurrection at the capital. The temperature in the pot is at a boil, and we crabs still fight to keep anyone from escaping.

I don’t know if people are really ready for a civil war, a true civil war, when the government loses its hold upon territories and people’s differences become so egregious that it’s almost as if we’re two different species: Homo Democratus and Homo Republicanensus. Right now what we need are for people to realize that we are still countrymen and women, that we do still share some fundamental ideals. For what is gained by labeling nearly 74 million people enemies of the state, along with their families, their children, their businesses, and their friends? What is gained when we muddy the water so much that we don’t know who is who? What is gained, aside from despair and distrust?

We’ll have to wait and see.