Posted by
I2 on Tuesday, April 08, 2008 6:39:42 PM
So the Olympic Torch has arrived in San Francisco and security is tight. It should be, given the childish displays in Europe over the past week which resulted in very adult violence. Of course, several groups and individuals will do their best to demonstrate that the US can hold it own against the bullies in the rest of the world wrapped up in "demonstrators" clothes.
But, beyond the torch, what does the plethora of quasi-violent protests that have become so popular of late say about the average human being’s ability to engage in productive discourse? Many other writers much better than I have expounded on this subject and it all seems to boil down to a few key points.
Human decency has taken a very back seat to the individual pursuit of infamy. The secondary and tertiary meaning and effect of individual actions has gone the way of the Dodo. Who, in good conscience, could actually protest at a funeral?!? These people are more solipsistic than anything previously seen in 7000 years of recorded history.
There is no sense of legitimacy for any institution. "The school," "the corporation," "the police," "the government" even "the Olympics" are all perceived as evil entities bent on achieving some dastardly conspiracy that cuts to the heart of some individual’s sense of right. No one working within these institutions will be allowed as a good and decent human being trying to do their best and occasionally making an honest mistake.
Hyperbole has replaced reason. When someone misstates a fact during a narrative they're creating at the time (Senator McCain confusing Al-Qaeda with Iran vice Syria); that's an error. When the President accepts the opinion of his own intelligence agency, several members of his own legislature (from both sides of the aisle) and the near unanimous conclusion of every nation's intelligence service that there were WMDs in Iraq, and it turns out somewhat false; that's a mistake. A lie is when someone deliberately misstates facts from memory; such as sniper fire when there wasn't any or how one isn’t aware of the inner thoughts of their spiritual advisor of two decades. Of course, there's always a certain finger waiving denouncement that's become something of a cliché in the past decade.
Back to topic, every US Person has a right to peaceably assemble and express their grievances. When our protests become confrontational, we begin down a slippery slope toward Banana Republicanism marked by perpetual warfare between opposing individuals, groups they're associated with and, ultimately, their own government.
For the many "pacifists" who so fervently appose the unjust and illegal war in Iraq (or even the war on terror globally) and, most recently, China's relations with Tibet, they seem perfectly content to re-usher in the glory days of 13th century feudalism with their avant garde protests.