A Message to My Friends: We Have Always Embraced this Violence; We Must Stop
Dear Friends:
I know that many of you ask to hear my thoughts in moments like these and there is no question that I have yet to get my head around the events that happened at the Capitol on Wednesday. I want to write to say that this is un-American, but, as much as I want to say those words, the reality is that this virulent strand of violence is very much American.
From The Knight Riders, the militant
band of tobacco farmers who burned the farms of poor growers in Kentucky in the
1900s to Timothy McVeigh and the Michigan Militia that were responsible from
the Oklahoma City Bombing in We fought a Civil War against this, and 156 years later the
Confederate Battle Flag flew in a Capitol hallway in front of a portrait of
Senator Charles Sumner, who was beaten in the Senate Chamber five years before
the Civil War, by a Congressman for the crime of giving a speech against
Southern planters and slaveholders. America has always solved her problems
with violence. I have no doubt the hangman’s gally and the nooses on the National
Mall on Wednesday would have been used by the insurrectionist mob to hang the
Vice President and our Congressional leadership if the Capitol and D.C. police
had not spirited them away.
Unless America begins to see herself for who she is, we will
never survive as a nation; we will never live up to the ideals we were founded
on. We will fall like the Roman Republic.
Unlike places like China, Russia or North Korea, many things
are negotiable in the American experiment. Even racism, gender discrimination and
an assortment of other anachronistic ideas can exist within our body of
politic. We accept the darkness so the light can also shine. However, some
things should become non-negotiable. One of them is violence. We should provide
no comfort to those who incite mobs, insurrection and attacks on the very
fabric of the United States.
Two weeks after the Presidential election, I received a call
from a distraught friend. His family had grown up during Communism and Socialistic
dictatorship in the Baltic States. He believed the extremist media he had begun
watching who said that the election was stolen and that Socialism was headed to
America. For him, that meant violence, opposition, torture and jailing, not healthcare
for all, addressing climate change and tackling poverty. As I was comforting
him in this moment, I realized that many intelligent people in this nation have
been radicalized by Donald Trump in the fashion of Osama bin Laden. It is our duty
to help these people heal but we should broke no comfort for insurrection.
What happened on Wednesday is that natural conclusion of his
race filled demagoguery. Many of you have told me you supported President Trump
because of his policies. Many of you have excused his rhetoric by telling me “he
did not mean it.” Many of you told me that the opposition was worse than the
President. While I know that many of you who have held these positions love
your neighbors and have not given into the mob, you did enable them in the same
way Germans sat idly by and became Hilter’s willing executioners through their silence.
You should hold yourselves accountable. Seventy one years after we dropped the
first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, you gave this horrible and dangerous man the
nuclear codes. Four people died at the Capitol on Wednesday and 4,000 died of
coronavirus. A fifth person, a police officer, died of his injuries yesterday
and another 4,000 died from the coronavirus. I know you are going to tell me
you do not support this – but you did, when you turned away from the words that
he said. As Maya Angelou sagely noted, that when a person tells you who they
are, you should believe them. I do not understand why you didn’t and hope that
it was not because you did not care about people like me, like my family and
the officer who died at the Capitol. I do not believe any legal action should
be taken against you unless you committed or incited violence, but I do think
you should search your hearts for the lessons you can learn from this.
People say that what happened on Wednesday was an assault on
our democracy. That is untrue. We do not have a democracy, and, nor should we
have one. What happened yesterday was an assault on our Republic, a form of government
that the founders created that, despite our rhetoric otherwise, was designed to
be a check on the will of the people. For our founders knew, as you can see in
the Federalist Papers, that of the people and by the people is not always the
best idea. The idea for these restraints came from the Roman Republic, which
fell, in part, because of angry mobs who prevented the seating of duly elected representatives.
This led to the destruction of the Senate and gave way to Sulla, who seized power
by force to restore order and ended the Republic.
Unless we want to fall as the Romans did, we need to see
ourselves for who we are – the violence we embrace and the lies will tell
ourselves about how exceptional and good we are. We should charge forward to build a
better America – one that has never really existed.
As Congressman John Lewis, who was beaten on that Alabama
bridge, often said, “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”
Jayson
