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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 1996 1995; from the neo-Nazis who took shelter in Idaho in the 1990s to the people who attempted to kidnap Michigan Governor Jennifer Whitmer just last year; from Ku Klux Klan terrorizing blacks in the Deep South to the beatings by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday in 1965; from the Birmingham Church Bombing that killed Condoleezza Rice’s childhood friend in 1963 to the Killers of the Floor Moon who killed Native Americans in Osage County over oil deposits in the 1920s; from the air and ground assault by the citizens of Tulsa on Black Wall Street in 1921 to the murders of black Americans in Rosewood the year before to Bloody Edgefield, a part of South Carolina where violence against people of all colors has been used as a way to terrorize and settle disputes since before the revolution.

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

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