Eye For An Eye

VILLAGER: We should defend ourselves. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!
TEVYE: Very good. That way, the whole world will be blind and toothless!

From “Fiddler On The Roof”

Brock Turner raped an unconscious young woman behind a Palo Alto dumpster, received a staggeringly lenient six-month prison sentence for the offense, and only served half of it due to “good behavior” or some other rich white boy nonsense.

Upon returning home to his native Ohio, he was greeted by a ring of openly armed protesters surrounding the Turner family home, presumably waiting for a shipment of torches and pitchforks to get dropped off by Amazon before burning the place down.

Meanwhile, over at the Standing Rock Reservation in North (South?) Dakota, protesters against the quasi-legal Dakota Access Pipeline project currently under construction there recently had a team of corporate dogs set upon them, literally and metaphorically.

The rent-a-butchers in question brought with them a pack of German shepherds, which they didn’t hesitate to unleash on the mostly Native American demonstrators when they refused to disperse. Panic and bloodshed ensued, and a photo of one of the handlers reining in a bloody-jawed canine quickly went viral.

It didn’t take long for some intrepid basement-dwelling sleuth or other to find out everything about her, and before long, an embarrassing amount of her personal information — gub’mint name, address, telephone number, e-mail, even the names of her parents — was released to the world.

I’m not going to pretend for a moment that what either of these individuals have done is even the slightest bit excusable. It’s not. All the same, I’m not going to pretend that these responses are either, however unsurprising they may be.

Brock Turner is a quintessential WASP-y scumbag whose skin color, wealth, and connections helped him skate through what should have been a slam-dunk trial for the prosecution. As such, I’m going to change his name to Rapey McRaperson for the remainder of the conversation.

Both of Rapey’s parents agitated for clemency to the Stanford alumnus who presided over his case, and they even brought in famed appellate lawyer Dennis Riordan to challenge the conviction. If there’s anyone who can get Brock Turner off besides an unconscious sorority girl, the guy who freed Barry Bonds, Ed Rosenthal, and The West Memphis Three can.

But it’s one thing collect a group of people to shout down his front door, another to show up for that with death threat posters and high-caliber weaponry. America abandoned the notion of posse comitatus a great many years ago, did we not? What are they gonna do, shoot him?

Wait…don’t answer that.

What’s worse, media outlets that are normally quite critical of open-carry protesters have been notoriously silent when it comes to those protesters setting their sights on someone they clearly and justifiably don’t like. Let’s not forget, many of these guys strapping it on for Brock Turner are the same fake-ass patriots that periodically show up at your local Starbucks armed to the teeth demanding a double shot of freedom with every Frappucino.

But as long as we all can agree that Brock Turner and his parents are a flock of shitbirds, we’re entitled to render their safety against gun violence forfeit, right? How does that even make sense?

To call what’s happening at the Turner family home “counterproductive” is to put it very mildly, but that’s the word Slate chose for the headline by a recent article by Christina Cauterucci, one of the only journalists besides this one that seems to grasp the ugliness of the situation:

“[T]he ghastly implications of these protests are not justified by their intent. No occasion warrants applause for assault rifles carried openly on the sidewalk in a nod to vigilante violence. The open-carry protests edge dangerously close to an erroneous argument…that guns make women safer and the only way to stop rape is to practice better self-defense.”

Now when it comes to Beast Woman, it takes a special kind of asshole to let slip the dogs of war on a group of people whose only crime is not wanting some greedy multinational corporation to destroy their ancestral home. People like George Wallace and Strom Thurmand come to mind. This woman is an amoral monster, without a doubt.

Nevertheless, “doxxing” people — the act of leaking their personal information to the public — is equally dangerous for its completely haphazard and deeply personal nature. Painting a target on this woman’s back in such a fashion leaves her wide open to all manner of violence, especially given the savage nature of her actions. Same goes for anyone around her at the time.

Furthermore, we’re not just talking about some hateful bitch with an angry Pomeranian here; we’re talking about a presumably trained professional, private security agent who is likely armed and almost never traveling alone, especially now.

That knowledge alone gives me hope that someone won’t be stupid enough to try anything if/when they get a hold of her information; otherwise, the gravediggers will be working overtime that week, I can assure you.

Never mind the fact that this cautionary tale serves to reinforce the point in the aforementioned Slate piece about the myth that guns make women safer. Literally millions of women are stalked and harassed online with every passing second; what’s to stop even more of them from arming up to follow Beast Woman’s example, only to become yet another statistic in the case for gun control?

The problem with all of this lies in the fact that a society that tacitly views rape as permissible and certain segments of the population as expendable will inevitably produce ground-floor vigilantism amongst victims and their allies. It’s called “blowback,” people. Look it up.

If Judge Persky wasn’t a rape apologist, then Rapey would have had the book thrown at him, and a satisfied public wouldn’t feel compelled to take up arms in his front yard, terrorizing his whole family and probably more than a few neighbors, too.

If Dakota Access LLC placed people and planet over profits, or if state and federal agencies ensured that they did, there would be no pipeline project, no decimated burial sites, no dog attacks, and no last-ditch political brinksmanship and white woman recentering on behalf of Jill Stein in her doomed presidential campaign.

In the wake of an atrocity, if the law is not on your side, then your only recourse may very well be to take matters into your own hands. Just be careful that your pursuit of justice doesn’t lead to a quest for vengeance, lest you become a villain yourself, or just another victim.

(AUTHOR’S NOTE: As of this writing, the protesters scored a minor victory on halting pipeline construction, which had nothing to do with her or her Wi-Fi allergies.)