When does violence become a rational response?

When does violence become a rational response? It being the holiday season, I wish I could suspend for a time my relentless anxiety over the state of our nation. One school of religious instruction would have me forego the temporal, the political, and be assured that it is all in God’s hands.

I cannot embrace this view. In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed a laissez faire approach nearly erased Christianity in Europe and diminish it greatly in the United States, while concomitantly increasing the size and power of the bureaucratic state at the expense of individual liberty.

So even if religion is not your deal, surely freedom is close to you. Our country was expressly established with Judeo-Christian principles in mind. And those same principles were foundational to the West’s rise in influence, freedom, and affluence.

Its greatest accomplishments were vanquishing tyranny and slavery in service to the recognition of the individual as unique and exalted, exceptional in the eyes of God, an ideal that is presently under siege or in chains throughout the West.

Distilled to the essential, these principles are the natural rights of men as defined and expounded upon by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. And while for most of us they may make for something less than the scintillating dinnertime conversation, they are the structure for everything dear to us.

Seemingly a stale, dull, and gray clothesline on which we hang our lovely garments. They are, in truth, elegant in purpose, and without them all of our pretty clothes are nothing more than a wet heap on the ground.

I can hear the ignorant wags’ voice. We’ve all got clothes dryers now, moron, through which my response is, yes, simpleton, and that’s a symptom of the problem. Our affluence has become so widespread and easily attained, so taken for granted, so assumed that we’ve lost sight of how and why it came about.

As a result, in only 75 years we’ve gone, for instance, from teenagers willing and able to fight and win a war on two fronts, to teenagers who can’t decide what sex they are and who become hysterical with rage and tears if challenged on the matter.

We won’t fight over principles, but we’ll destroy ourselves over frivolous nonsense. That is a fall so precipitous that it brings our survival into question. And it raises for me another question. At what point is violence a rational response?

An ever-growing, ever-encroaching, never-resting affliction has, to this moment, met with no response. Think of the catalog of sins. A majority of the people in this country believe there was fraud in the last presidential election.

But there has been no probative investigation, no attempt to allay fears. We know from the Carter Baker Commission earlier this century that mail -in absentee ballots pose the greatest threat to election integrity.

And we know paper ballots and voter ID are an easy solution. But these get neither consideration nor traction. Why not? Cui bono, who benefits? And what does that benefit mean? We know that significant elements of what gets labeled the deep state, including the Department of Justice, FBI, and CIA, targeted Donald Trump before he was elected and continued to do so after his election, most notably through the Russian collusion nonsense that they knew from the outset was a hoax with some of their number being significant players in that hoax.

That’s treason. The nation’s response has been legalistic hen-ringing. People who did nothing beyond stroll through the Capitol on January 6th remain in jail or have been sentenced to prison. In terms of destruction and violence, they did nothing approaching the BLM and ANTIFA outrages.

None of the demonstrators were armed, and the only people who lost their lives were unarmed women shot and beaten by Capitol police. This has meant nothing to certain members of our judiciary…