I have frightened myself this week. While viewing the live footage of the attack on the Capitol, I found myself wanting the police to open fire and leave not a single corpse twitching.
It would be easy to say, “This is not who I am.” But of course, it is. I felt it, so honesty demands that I own it. Now politicians and commentators of all stripes are clutching their pearls (or their balls) and saying, “This is America. This is not who we are.”
Bullshit. Political violence is as American as apple pie, going back at least to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791. Arguably, America was built on political violence (1776, anyone?), to say nothing of genocidal elimination of the Other. Any of us could probably create a list of atrocities perpetrated on this continent and quite likely in our names. We are not a nation of innocent children and never have been. An innocent nation-state has never existed, and tribal and other forms of warfare existed long before that. Humans are not a nice species.
Our bodies evolved with a fight-or-flight response, which was exceedingly useful in those millennia when we were likely prey animals and since then has kept many people alive in emergency situations. In those Wednesday afternoon moments when our nation's Capitol and legislature were under siege by marauding barbarians (or so a Roman citizen would have felt when the Visigoths invaded), when adrenaline was pumping and overwhelming other parts of my brain, “Slay them all, God will know his own” (check out the Albigensian Crusade) seemed a reasonable response. And if the aim is simply to eradicate the immediate threat and get out with one's skin reasonably intact, it is.
But it is no way to run a country, especially not one of over 300 million people, numbers unimaginable to those long-ago mammals who were evolving our hormonal responses. I suspect those numbers were also unimaginable to the writers of the US Constitution. The marauders who invaded our Capitol this week saw themselves as warriors. During their takeover and at many times before and since then, as a member of a religious and (in my part of the world) political minority, I have felt that I lived in an armed camp hostile to my very existence. Never mind that I managed a thirty-year career as a teacher and except for vandalized political signs and occasional catcalls have lived relatively unmolested. Adrenaline does not think, and it overwhelms our kinder impulses. It comes close to murdering our better angels.
I do not have any final wisdom to offer. I do not know the best way for Congress and law enforcement to proceed at this time. I do know that if a generally mild-mannered English teacher and people who own pool-cleaning companies or sell real estate (to name only two professions represented among the rioters) can move quickly to blind blood rage, we have work to do. Killing anyone who disagrees with us is not the best way to go about it.
Here is a flower. With a butterfly. Breathe. Maybe then we can talk.
