America, at a Crossroads

America is at a crossroads. We can continue down the road of deeper divide, where only the lunatic fringe seems to get any attention, or we can try to bring things back to some semblance of moderation.

Ah yes; “moderation.” “The avoidance of excess or extremes, especially in one’s behavior or political opinions.” “The action of making something less extreme, intense, or violent.” “The quality of being moderate; restraint; avoidance of extremes or excesses; temperance.”

I remember when Pearl Jam released their first album, Ten, in 1991. It had a song named Porch on it. One of the lyrics went, “Initiatives are taken up…By the Middle…There ain’t gonna be any middle anymore.” It was vague, like a lot of song lyrics. But Eddie Vedder was prescient. He saw the future.

There ain’t any middle anymore, and there hasn’t been for a very long time.

But here’s the thing, as I see it; you can still be liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, whatever, so forth and so on, and still be close to the middle; to one side or the other, but moderate.

This has somehow become lost on people.

We live in a world of extremes. And what extremism does is push people to the outer fringes of acceptable human conduct. The vast majority of people sit by silently, because although they might have something to offer to get us all out of this mess, the safety and anonymity of remaining silent far outweigh the costs of voicing any reasonable alternative to the current social discourse. Taking constructive action seems futile, and to some people, even dangerous. That’s how bad it has gotten.

Notice my use of the word “constructive,” here, because I am now going to move into a few examples of what is not constructive and what is, at least as history has shown it. Constructive is defined as, “Helping to improve; promoting further development or advancement.”

Today is July 4th, Independence Day in the United States. We fly the flag, we revisit the founding fathers, we even quote them.

When we celebrate July 4th, I think we must be responsible and honest with ourselves and recognize that although we are a free republic, our republic was born in violence. There is simply no way around this fact. We rebelled and fought a war to create the United States.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy made a career of examining the violence from which America was formed and the violence that has preserved not only our republic, but other free nations and the freedom of countless people around the world. Consider the Civil War (the republic preserved), WWI (allied democratic republics preserved), WWII, (western civilization preserved), etc.

For instance, professor, author, and historian Victor Davis Hanson, in his best-selling book, Carnage and Culture, argued that our armed forces have been the most lethal in all of human history because of principles such as consensual government, a tradition of self-critique, religious tolerance, individual freedom, free expression, free markets, free elections, and merit in the selection and promotion of our military service members. Bringing together personal freedom, discipline, and organization to the battlefield, powerful marching democracies have been more likely to defeat non-Western forces assembled by unstable or tyrannical governments, of limited funding, and intolerant of open discussion.

The fact that western democratic principles have created the most lethal military forces in the history of civilization is a bit ironic and not something a lot of people want to talk about.

One literary critic once said of McCarthy, “McCarthy both makes sure that the reader knows that violence is without limit and beginning, and thus in the end universal, and his particular interest is in exposing the violent underpinnings of modern America through his explorations of the savagery of the borderlands in the post-Civil War period. He wants to remind an America interested in forgetting and wedded to constructing stories of progress and peace that violence is its heritage and, arguably, its foundation.”

This is all well and good and understandable when we are talking about war and the founding, expansion, and preservation of our country, warts and all. The problem becomes that some people cross the line — a line that is not “thin” by any means — and use the founding fathers as an excuse to impose their will by employing violence in order to bring about political change.

Let’s consider two historical examples at the opposite ends of what is acceptable and effective and what is not.

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people, including 19 children, and injured another 680. He was reportedly angry about two events.

The first was an incident now commonly referred to as “Ruby Ridge.” Government agents were investigating a guy named Randy Weaver for weapons charges. When he failed to show up in court, they decided to execute an arrest warrant in person at his home, which was located in an extremely isolated area in the wooded hills of far northern Idaho. The accounts have always differed, but famed attorney Gerry Spence successfully argued at Weaver’s trial that Weaver was acting in self-defense when armed and camouflage- wearing agents showed up unannounced in the woods around his house. An agent shot and killed Weaver’s teenage son, and after a short firefight, a standoff ensued. During the standoff, an FBI sniper shot and killed Weaver’s wife, who was standing inside the home holding her infant daughter.

The second was at Waco in 1993, when federal agents again decided to execute an arrest warrant for one David Koresh, and another firefight between federal agents and other members of the Branch Davidians ensued. More federal agents and civilians lost their lives. Another standoff followed. The siege resulted in the deaths of 76 Branch Davidians, including 25 children, two pregnant women, and David Koresh. In total, the 51-day siege resulted in the deaths of four federal agents and 82 Branch Davidians, 28 of whom were children.

A lot of people on all sides were angry about these two events. I myself was also angry about what had happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco. I thought it inconceivable and unprofessional for an FBI sniper to fire a rifle shot through a window into a dwelling without having first clearly acquired a target that was presenting a threat, and killing a young mother who had a baby in her arms. Totally unacceptable. The government evidently agreed with this assessment because they settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Weaver a few years later for more than 3 million dollars.

I also thought the decision to execute warrants at the Branch Davidian compound was foolish; evidence established that Koresh usually went on a morning run down roads away from the compound. Agents could’ve easily taken him down without incident when he was alone during one of these runs. But for some reason, they wanted to go into the compound during the middle of the day in riot gear.

A lot of people were very upset about what happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco. But there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to voice dissent and protest.

Back to McVeigh. If I had been at DOJ at that time, I would’ve crawled over the top of the lead prosecutor, Joe Hartzler, to prosecute that case. But I wasn’t, and Hartzler got to do it. And my point here is perfectly encapsulated in his brilliant opening statement to the jury.

When McVeigh was arrested by an alert Oklahoma state trooper on Interstate 35 north of Oklahoma City, a notebook was recovered during the search of his vehicle. It contained a quote attributed to one of the founding fathers. In a 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

In his opening statement, Hartzler said, “You will hear evidence in this case that McVeigh liked to consider himself a patriot, someone who could start the second American Revolution. The literature that was in his car when he was arrested included some that quoted statements from the founding fathers. McVeigh isolated and took these statements out of context, and he did that to justify his anti-government violence.”

“Well, ladies and gentlemen, the statements of our forefathers can never be used to justify warfare against innocent children. Our forefathers didn’t fight British women and children. They fought other soldiers. They fought them face to face, hand to hand. They didn’t plant bombs and run away wearing earplugs.”

Violence is not the way to bring about change. Whether it’s someone at the extreme like Timothy McVeigh, whether it’s people wearing masks who firebomb federal buildings with Molotov cocktails, whether they assault law enforcement officers, trespass on or destroy government property, interfere with government operations, or whether they do any of it to protest a Democrat or Republican president, people who do this kind of thing are not “righteous rebels” or “freedom fighters.”

They are all the same. They are all criminals of varying degree.

On the other end of the spectrum, I suppose, is someone like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The principles of “nonviolent protest” seem lost on many people. According to the United States Institute of Peace, nonviolent resistance has been shown empirically to be twice as effective as armed struggle in achieving major political goals.

Tactics of nonviolent resistance, such as bus boycotts, “Freedom Rides,” sit-ins, marches, and mass demonstrations, were used during the Civil Rights Movement. It succeeded in bringing about legislative change, making segregation illegal, and obtaining full Voting Rights and open housing.

One study found that nonviolent activism of the era tended to produce favorable media coverage and changes in public opinion focusing on the issues organizers were raising, but violent protests tended to generate unfavorable media coverage that generated public desire to restore law and order.

In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King summed up this acceptable and most effective way to bring about change. Indeed, King was arrested 29 times for engaging in nonviolent protest.

“One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer.

They will be old, oppressed, battered black women, symbolized in a seventy-two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.”

They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake.

One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

It would be good for us if we could get back to some semblance of moderation. I think the republic functions much better and effectively that way. Unfortunately, I don’t have any perfect answers regarding how to do that. Violence isn’t the answer, nor for the vast majority of people is getting oneself arrested 29 times.

But perhaps maybe, just maybe, there’s a whole bunch of middle ground that we can consider.

Perhaps make attempts to make a small difference day to day, person to person; incremental actions, when an opportunity presents itself. Maybe that’s a good place to begin.

Glen Hines is the author of five books, including the recently published Of Time and Rivers, and the highly-regarded Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. He is the writer and producer of the book and podcast Welcome to the Machine, available on most podcast platforms. His writing has also been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.