Where’s the line that can’t be crossed?

Surely there’s something so vile, so intolerable, so universal in its horror that there’s no other choice but to stop and shut everything down. Something where a hashtag would be insulting, where a march or protest would be insufficient. Something that necessitates an absolute refusal to comply, withholding all work and diverting all focus to rioting, property damage, and violence. Complete civil disobedience.

If the pitcher pulls out a pistol and shoots the batter, then I’m sorry to say we’re not playing baseball anymore. When the government disregards the rules of the game, what sense is there in the rest of us playing by the rules?

People need to become comfortable with the idea of violence as a means to political ends. It is the only rational answer to oppression. We’re not going to vote our way out of this.

A gun owner has decided—by purchasing a gun—that they’re okay with using it. Being comfortable killing another human is something I am not comfortable with. I want to believe that puts me on moral high ground, but it really just makes me vulnerable to someone who doesn’t care.

When any of us are faced with violence, we may have to respond with violence ourselves. By not responding with violence, we simply permit others to kill us. That’s a really tough moral dilemma. We’re over here debating whether punching fascists is okay when that’s the absolute least we should be doing.

Most people left-of-center have not quite contended with this. The Democratic Party is still largely led and influenced by the Obamas, and Michelle has famously said, “when they go low, we go high.” As a reminder, we’re no longer playing baseball. The virtue of going high is no longer of any value.

Can any of us really claim to maintain a moral high ground?

So again, where’s the line that—if crossed—you’d feel totally justified in being violent?

Most people would say they’d intervene violently if their family’s lives were in danger. Does the answer change when it’s the police putting your family in danger? What about when you remove your family from the equation, and instead it’s your friend? Your neighbor? It’s astounding how much these variables factor into the calculus.

Clearly, proximity is a factor. Five shot dead in a nearby neighborhood registers totally differently from five shot dead in a faraway war.

But it’s also in how we tend to classify things. It’s easier to dismiss something if we call it a tragedy rather than an atrocity, because that makes it easier to accept.

As migrants are detained, as trans people lose their rights, as Black people are murdered by police, will we continue to label these as tragedies we can’t do anything about? When will they be atrocities that cannot be tolerated with threat of public retaliation? Would the people of the United States of America permit another genocide? I fear so.

So where is the line? If none of these things that have already happened crossed that line, then where is it?

Ponder and debate where that line is that can’t be crossed, but while we do, we’ll witness a progression of a thousand more terrible things leading up to it. They’ll have no trouble committing atrocities that don’t cross that line, we’ll call them tragedies to cope, and we’ll think we can social-media post our way out of fascism, even though we know—deep down—we can’t.

Yes, there’ll be protests when police kill more Black people. There’ll be marches when more basic human rights are revoked. But most of these will be self-proclaimed peaceful protests. You have to know the government is fine with peaceful protests that pose no direct threat. They don’t care how you vote in four years. They only care if you’re going to stop them now.

Without a threat, there is no incentive to abide. That works both ways. The government threatens the wellbeing of the civilians so that civilians comply. But if the civilians are unwilling to be a threat themselves, then the government has no reason to comply.

Sure, we can say none of these awful things are tolerable, yet we provably tolerate them every day by going about our lives as usual the very next day. Because we’re tired and scared, with everything to lose.

But they’re not tired and scared. They’re quite comfortable. They know people left-of-center are unwilling to be violent for fear of losing the moral high ground. That allows them to walk right up to the line and step right over it.

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