Encouraging Violence Is an Act of Violence

Why the Trump campaign cannot be treated like business as usual.

Many of us have a much easier time condemning hate speech in our private lives. Our kitchens and dining room tables and even a heavily curated Facebook pages feel like safe places to speak out in rejection of hatred, bigotry, and those threats of bodily harm which seem altogether too common.

Trump and his campaign based on such rhetoric is something for which few of us were prepared. Speaking against it seems partisan. But it isn’t. Because this isn’t just about some words being said, this really is about who we are and who we expect to be. And none of us who call ourselves Christian can support this rhetoric. Because now that it has led to violence, it is no longer rhetoric.

We want peace

I had a disagreement with someone on Facebook several months ago and I said that in spite of our differences, we have some common ground: all of us do. We all want peace, we just disagree on the way we seek it. Liberals and Conservatives; Israelis and Palestinians; Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. We just define the terms of and methods of attaining peace differently.

I was shocked when he said “No we don’t. We don’t all want peace.”

I think my friend is wrong. The white nationalism and the white supremacist groups who have come out of the shadows in support of Trump want peace. Peace through violence. Peace through supremacy. Just like Rome. Peace by means of kicking out the other or suppressing their viewpoint. For them, peace is a warm gun today with the understanding that that they will have a job and the 1950s back tomorrow. Pax Romana.

I was emboldened last night as I read Laura Grace Weldon’s “Mr. Trump: Hate Speech Escalates Violence”. It captures the thinking I’ve had this week in the aftermath of Chicago and the easily predictable divide over who is at fault over the violence.

That division and that blame doesn’t go to the parties, or the protesters, or those attending the rally; it was one man: Donald Trump. He wound it up and set it off and walked away. Here is a chronological account of these public statements and calls for violence.

We have to say something.

He compares preventing violence to political correctness. He wants people in his crowd to beat up other people and the fact that they are being prevented from doing so is because of “political correctness.” Let that sink in for a minute.

Then he says “nobody wants to hurt each other anymore” like that’s a bad thing.

…but we are getting civil war

In the video I linked to above, you can see how this has been built. Maddow begins with the high-profile killing of young black men in Ferguson (St. Louis), Chicago, and Cleveland. The race, the Black Lives Matter movement, the political response on the right to support police.

I take it back further. Further to the disrespect given the president at the State of the Union, Stand Your Ground and “guns everywhere” laws. The belief that the U.S. is going to hell and we might as well speed it up by arming everyone. For defense. Then we redefine what counts as defense.

But really it is this simple idea; I don’t know when it came to dominate, but it did; that we live in a country that it is so dangerous, so horrible that we can’t trust the police to protect us because 1) it feels like they’re shooting at us and 2) our own governments are encouraging us to pack heat: even when our police beg us not to.

For so many, the world is already lawless. The only conceivable vision is to be on the winning side. Saddle up to strongman, the would-be tyrant. He’ll protect us. A Wild West by way of the Third World. Perhaps a dictator is all we need to fully transform into a banana republic.

Make Peace

We have to come out of our silos and change this.

It will take liberals to compromise first. To acknowledge what neoliberalism has done to the middle class and to all working families.

It will take Conservatives who aren’t white nationalists to stop playing the game. Stop worrying about conventions and elections and the party and stop thinking about the ways to stop one demagogue and replace him with another.

And it will take left-leaning and right-leaning moderates to stop pretending that we can ignore our problems and never talk about them and they will just go away. We need to all help craft the vision, rather than simply mediate between two competing visions.

We need everyone to see that we need a different vision than the one being peddled. Not the one of dystopian novels of turf-wars, indiscriminate violence, and the ever escalating calls that will eventually lead to someone getting killed. None of us actually wants to live in that world.

We don’t want to erase 60 years of hard work. We don’t want to take our country back or make it great again; we need a new vision. To raise children and work hard and travel and create new things. To find GOD in the midst of our hopes and in the fulfilling of dreams.

I am not standing against a Republican candidate for president. I’m standing against a bully imposing a nightmare on the weak. And I’m declaring that such a vision is so very far from the kingdom of GOD, to not oppose it would be sin.