Intensified Peacefulness
What is happening to this country?
Let me give you a few scenes from the past few weeks—vignettes of a nation seemingly falling apart.
Protesters go online to boast about surrounding the car of a “white woman” and to complain that police came to her rescue and wouldn’t allow them to imprison her in her vehicle.
Same with the protesters who blocked a couple in their car in order to shut down a bridge. All of this was originally posted by the protesters themselves on social media, not as a shameful admission of their bullying and intimidation of random passersby, but as chest thumping.
This is the use of force as virtue-signaling: “Look at me, I’m a good person who really cares about important issues, and you can tell that because I terrorized an elderly couple in their car.”
In Colorado, protesters blocked a freeway, causing a possibly frightened or confused driver to steer his Jeep through the crowd, which in turn caused one of the protesters to panic and fire a gun randomly, hitting two other protesters. The idea of going to a protest armed is something the left borrowed from anti-shutdown protesters on the right.
Because what could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong was illustrated in a tragicomic incident in Louisville, where a march with “rival militias” led to three people being shot—but the shooting was described by the police as “negligent” and the injuries were not life-threatening. In other words: a member of one of these so-called “militias” accidentally discharged his gun and grazed a few of his fellows.
It’s easy to laugh so long as nobody dies, but this is starting to get out of control, and we will be lucky if people keep living through it.
Read the rest at The Bulwark.