OPINION:
Portland, Oregon, as of this writing, is enjoying it’s 90th day of consecutive rioting. This past Tuesday, protesters kept up the tradition of vandalizing and breaking into City Hall, attacking police officers and destroying businesses. The day prior they burned the police union headquarters.
Meanwhile, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a second day of rioting, this in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake, has left two dead and untold number of businesses burned. On Friday, Al Sharpton is leading a march on Washington officially titled “Commitment March: Get Your Knee Off Our Necks.” Care to guess what will happen after sunset?
No need to guess, of course, since recent history has been a wonderful, albeit harsh teacher on this score. We will witness wanton destruction. Violence. Probably for a few nights.
What’s coming is no big secret or surprise. Shopkeepers are doubtless already nailing protective boards to their storefront windows. Those with means will have left the city by Thursday morning. Those who must stay stare out the window nervously. They know the police, cowed by the media and the Democrats, won’t be of immediate help. Citizens, everywhere across America, feel alone and unprotected.
Antifa, gang members, and every Tom, Dick and Harry level of degenerate, on the other hand, are beyond excited. Another “protest” means another chance to receive cover for nefarious activities. And in the right city, it means three months of cover. Again, to restate the obvious, it’s no big secret and surprise that criminals now understand any video of escalated police force (warranted or not) is carte blanche to tear up the town.
Why?
Because we have just about normalized rioting as an acceptable form of social protest.
What, exactly, does it mean to normalize something? Simply put, if “X” political or social event occurs, we as a society both expect and accept “Y” reaction. So, at the moment, any time a video depicting police aggression against African-Americans surfaces, we should expect first protests, and, after sunset, rioting. Politicians, especially Democrats, may intone in a mealy-mouthed kind of way, that of course they don’t sanction violence. But boy that message is impossible to accept with a straight face. One wonders how the residents of Seattle’s CHOP zone felt. Or today’s Portland denizens.
The way to break normalization is for Americans to agree that riots are simply not to be tolerated. Never, ever. When they break out, they should not be excused as the understandable simmering over of hurt feelings, and certainly they should never be allowed to endure for any longer than it takes to quell.
Republicans need to call out Democrats for failing to condemn the violence. For excusing it or for simply eliding the difference between protests and riots.
One suspects the normalization of violence is also being used like a political tactic. The media and some politicians frame the riots as a reaction to Republican policies of systemic racism. Psychologically, this telegraphs as “Vote Democrat and the protests stop. Only we can undo this. Vote Republican and you should expect more.”
The problem with this gambit is that normalization does not respect political boundaries. It’s not as if all of a sudden, were Joe Biden elected, he could tell people to just “calm down” after six months of benign neglect. The radical left understands this, which is why they push for violence after every protest. It is important, they calculate, to ingrain and accustom the populace to a new way of doing things.
Americans of every political persuasion need to resist the sometimes quite understandable urge to show their upset by tacitly accepting the leveling of every town and village at the drop of a cellphone video. And politicians, no matter which party, need to resist the urge of sanctifying the violence in order to score immediate political points.
Don’t let violence become our new normal.
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