Is it just me, or has something unprecedented happened in our country over the past two years? Since coming of voting age 31 years ago and taking an interest in politics, I have participated in arguments with people of differing opinion which have been by turns both enlightening and bruising but nevertheless I was still able to work with them at my job on a daily basis, attend company gatherings and church with them and genuinely rejoice with them on happy occaisions and wish them well during times of illness or tragedy. That was 31 years ago and now it seems that over those years something has gone terribly, horribly wrong .
I have lived to see the day that an elected representative of the people would, during a Presidential address, call the President of the United States a liar. I have lived to see the day that dozens if not hundreds of my fellow countrymen would arrive, armed to the teeth, at rallies where our President was going to speak and presumably bear those arms in order to intimidate any and all present, especially our President. Had you told me 31 years ago that a day was coming where hundreds of our fellow citizens would gather and force our elected reprsentatives to pass through a gauntlet of spitting, cursing, and racial slurs I wouldn't have believed you. Had you told me that supporters of right-wing candidates would punch, kick, and curb-stomp anyone with the audacity to try and exercise their right to freedom of speech at publicly held campaign rallies I would have doubted your truthfulness, and yet here we are at a point in time where each of these violations of civility, decency and our Bill of Rights are a fait accompli.
Allow me to ask something else: is it just me or does anyone else feel like enough is enough? Could I possibly be the only progressive in the country who feels that the "usual methods" of addressing this nonsense (i.e. voting for progressive candidates, blogging, carrying signs in public demonstrations, writing to your congressman, etc) have simply been nullified and rendered ineffective by the violence and thuggery of the Right Wing?
Please don't jump to a conclusion, as I declare unequivocally that my post is not a "call to arms" (though perhaps it should be) but a genuine attempt to find out if I'm truly the only one out here who thinks that it is past time for us to seriously consider becoming Progressives with Guns?
I grew up in a very rural area of the Appalachias where owning firearms was (and still is) as natural as breathing. I was given a rifle at 8 years of age and started learning to shoot right away (lots of my friends started much earlier) and would later become a fairly avid hunter and a crack shot. In my high-school gym class, when I was a Senior, we actually had a "Marksmenship" course and the only person who could out-shoot me was a first-cousin who also happened to be a girl.
I come from people who were oppressed and beaten down by Coal Barons and Timber Barons and were frequently left with no other recourse than to defend themselves; simple, uneducated people standing toe-to-toe against overwhelming physical force and political power, armed with simple shotguns against machine guns and govenment issued high-powered rifles. I come from a state where our existing State Police force was created by a governor who needed his own private army to serve his wealthy patrons and to run down, beat, arrest, jail, interrogate, murder and otherwise attempt to demoralize Union Men and Women. Only a couple of miles from where I sit as I write this is a large residential area covered with the homes of the middle-class and wealthy but which once was, in the 1920's, an air-field used by the United States Army Air Force as a staging area for launching bombing sorties against the Miner's Amry as they made their way toward Logan County and Blair Mountain.
My great-grandfather attempted to join this "Miner's Army" and participate in the Miner's March on Logan only to have his shotgun confiscated by Federal Troops at the local train depot and then be told to go home or go to jail and coming, as he did, from a very practical people, he went home (much to my great-grandmother's relief). That same great-grandfather had grown up in a world where there was no "safety net" of any kind. While he was just a boy his father died and his mother was forced to take him and his siblings to a "poor farm" where they suffered indignities that marked him and hardened him for the rest of his life.
My mother's father and her uncle served in the second World War, fighting in Europe against an earlier incarnation of the Tea Party/GOP and both of them spent the rest of their lives until the days they were burried carrying metal in their bodies from wounds received in that struggle.
Having said all this about my forebears let me add how sad and heartbroken I am to have to admit that it is the grand-children, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of those same brave people who make up a such a large portion of the gun-toting thugs now current in our land. We've simply come full-circle, the main difference being that no longer do the wealthy and well-heeled need to rely on hired guns, local law-enforcement or the military due to their terror of working people; no, they've managed to condition the very people they trample and abuse and make of them their willing shock-troops in the advance of the Right Wing.
I give this brief outline of my family and local history to make the simple point that there is no contradiction between being Progressive and offering resistence, even if that resistence devolves to the point of using physical force.
So then, this then is the culture that has formed and shaped me and my understanding of the concepts of justice and injustice and which leads me to ask, no, plead with anyone who will listen: Is it just me?
I'm anything but some macho, tough-guy spoiling for a show-down. In fact, just this past summer I worked part-time for the Census and had someone pull a gun on me. I had to quit after that, because from then on I thought that every door that opened held the same prospect and I couldn't take it; I'm just not that tough. Quite the contrary; I'm the bookish, contemplative, introspective sort, much more comfortable in a Cathedral at 7:00 am for Eucharistic Adoration, or sitting at my dining room table trying to work through a tough bit of theology from one of the Fathers of the early church or trying to teach myself how to write SQL or LaTex on my aging laptop. An egg-head, a geek, and up until now at least, a pacifist. But what I've witnessed over the past two years is changing that and I'm asking myself, "Are we too late?". Have we already reached the point where the Communists, Socialists, Jews, Gypsys, and Gay people found themselves in the Germany of the early 1930's? The point where the Nazi's had become too powerful to be successfully resisted? Or are we still at the point where the supporters of the Weimar Republic should have and could have become Progressives with Guns and vigorously opposed the Right Wing? Or is the answer neither one?
If you answer, "neither one", then please help me understand just how far do we allow the facists to go until we say, "enough is enough"? How many more armed militias need to form? How many more bricks need to be thrown through the windows of political parties who oppose them? How many more people need to punched and stomped before we try to do what our ineffective and ineffectual representatives in government have failed to do, which is to simply say, you've gone so far but you'll go no further?
I'm also not writing because of sour-grapes over the election. As I write its election day and I'm expecting a drubbing at the polls of historic proportions. Sure, I hate to lose as much as the next person, but I'm a grown-up; I can take it. Tormorrow, I'll get up, dust myself off, carry myself with as much dignity as I can muster, and get ready for the next election. I'm just not a sore loser. No, I'm writing because I am genuinely worried about what is happening in our country and would like some feed-back from other Progressives on what they think about what I think.
I've got to be honest with you and say that at this point I think that seeing 1000 armed progessives show up at lots of Right-Wing campaign events in 2012, carrying signs that say, "You won't stomp on me" just might have a salutary effect. Is it possible that they'll be provoked? Yes, in fact you can pretty much gurantee they will be, but could they possibly be more than they already are? Mightn't they respond in kind? They already have and they did so without armed provocation. I DON'T want to go the armed route, and feel quite certain that most, if not all of you will assure me that I'm stupid, irresponsible, part of the problem, out of my mind, as nutty as our opponents, giving in to baser urges, making things worse, not better, becoming the thing I despise, etc. and perhaps, oddly enough, that's just what I want to hear you say, because hearing such replies will allow me to go back to sleep, to relax and tell myself this will pass. But sometimes I think the tide of events simply moves on, heedless of our preferences, and forces us to decide what we're going to do, and how we'll proceed from here, even if that means doing the very things we don't prefer, even if it means becoming Progressives with Guns.