Preparing for a Rocky Time

Insurrection in my birth country is not simply politics, and because my birth country is the USA, what happens there affects the entire world. It has been nearly a week since the Capitol was violently invaded by people who sought to find and, by the look of what they did and by what they said, murder elected officials who were in the midst of certifying a valid election.

The danger of even worse happening in the USA is extremely high. To understand this better, it may help if you know something I observed directly during the years when I was most involved in societal change activism. We went about it peacefully. We sought to adjust the course of the system, not overthrow it. We got harassment and death threats from the predecessors of the 6 January insurrectionists. Once in a while we got hurt… or worse.

But the pattern was not even across the country and this has implications for the safety of every person or business in the USA right now. The most widely reported incidents were then and in the next several days are likely to be in obvious centers of attention such as D.C. and state capitols. That is designed to saturate the news media. But if the old pattern is repeated, there will also be episodes in widely scattered places that seem out of the way. Those additional flare-ups are located and timed to make it seem like people with those values, those attitudes and those methods are everywhere, perhaps a majority. It looks like spontaneous grass roots eruption but it isn’t.

This may sound weird, but it was most dangerous in places that were heavily tilted toward either side. The direction of tilt did not matter much in regard to safety. The extent of the tilt mattered. It looks like that pattern still holds true.

Today we would paint areas by political color, red or blue, and we would describe evenly split areas as purple. The tilt back then was less clearly associated with political parties. It had more to do with stances on a handful of hot-button issues, and they can’t be properly described as liberal and conservative even though it was common to shoehorn them into those labels.

Let’s not make that mistake. Let’s call the two ends of the spectrum Dogs and Cats. This isn’t fair to dogs or cats, for which I apologize, but it will do for the moment. Some people adore dogs and hate cats. Some people adore cats and hate dogs. Most people are not terribly extreme about this and may feel more or less the same about both types of pets.

Using this substitute for the actual issues, some places were vehemently pro-Dog or pro-Cat. Being a pro-Dog activist in such places was dangerous. You may find this counter-intuitive. You may expect pro-Dog activists to get threatened, beaten up or even killed in a heavily pro-Cat area, and yes that happened. Pro-Cat people dominated those areas and that gave them a sense of being able to do anything they wanted. But it also happened in heavily pro-Dog areas. At first that didn’t make sense.

It was safest in places where general opinion was almost evenly split and public debate was most contentious. It has been that way since the 2016 election too, when the pattern of behavior is painted with a broad brush. There are always individual exceptions but the general pattern still operates.

Why? Why are evenly balanced places safest, and why are pro-Dog people at so much risk in heavily pro-Dog places where most people are on their side? And what does that imply about the next several days for people and places of business?

In heavily pro-Dog places, the pro-Cat people felt they had no hope of ever getting what they wanted through legitimate means. It looked to them like they had nothing to lose by resorting to extreme methods. Some of them, the most irrational and most emotionally wound up and most vitriolic, saw no reason to hold back.

Colorado was a prime example of an evenly split place. It is easy to put big issues on the ballot as a referendum there, so both sides of the political coin try out new policy ideas that way. In the 1980s and 1990s referendums became more and more volatile, and they were often won or lost by razor thin margins (on the order of one vote per precinct). Living and working there felt tense. Colorado Springs had ongoing bumper sticker wars. Just looking at the bumpers of nearby vehicles showed how fervent people were and how half-and-half the split was. But it wasn’t as physically dangerous as being in, say, Oklahoma or Oregon at opposite ends of the spectrum. It got fatal there. In Colorado both sides recognized that if they acted too crazy, it could cost them the next referendum.

The Presidential election in November was not close. The nation as a whole is not an evenly split place. There aren’t a lot of evenly split areas within it, either. There are bubbles and patches, a red splotch in one spot and a blue splotch in another and not enough purple splotches.

The FBI is late and incomplete in warning that it sees plans for armed ‘protests’ in DC and all 50 state capitols from 16 to 20 January. Ample evidence is in public view to show that 6 January was a prelude. If you or your business are in a prime target city, definitely take extra precautions for safety. But if you are elsewhere, that doesn’t mean you can relax. Your town could be among the ones chosen to create an appearance of ‘spontaneous’ nationwide uprising. There is a limit to how many people can wreak havoc in so many places at once, so expect a few shortcuts that don’t need a large mob such as the pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails found ready for use in DC.

Please stay safe if you can.