In my view, reasonably intelligent people with consciences do not resolve their differences with violence, but rather with words.  Listening to others’ views and reasons for their views is just as important as sharing your own views.  Most differences between such people – adults – are resolved peacefully and include some give-and-take, some compromise.  Such things as screaming, ranting, name-calling and bullying have never accomplished much of anything except to create hard feelings and leave issues unresolved, festering, only to resurface one day.  Violence has no place in a truly civil society.

Which begs the question, is the U.S. truly a “civil” society?

A woman in Texas was arrested for threatening to murder Judge Tanya Chutkan, the Washington D.C. judge who is presiding over the pending trial of Donald Trump on charges of attempting to overthrow the 2020 election on January 6^th.  Her threats were particularly vile and extremely racist.

Every single prosecutor who has charged Donald Trump, from Alvin Bragg to Jack Smith to Fani Willis, has been threatened with violence and even death, as have their families!  Now, some might say that it’s just people blowing off steam, expressing their anger, but I beg to differ.  Remember last year when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was brutally beaten by a man who had a bone to pick with Speaker Pelosi?  Remember seeing Shay Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman testify to the January 6^th committee about the violent threats they had received after Trump and Giuliani told lies about them?  Remember the plot to kidnap and kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer?

This week, the names of the grand jurors in Georgia who voted to indict Trump and 18 others on numerous charges pertaining to the attempt to override the vote and change the election results in 2020, were made public, as is dictated by Georgia law.  What happened?  From an article in NPR …

On a far-right website, where the QAnon conspiracy theory originated, an anonymous user on Tuesday shared a list of the 23 grand jurors with their supposed full names, ages and addresses. Amid a torrent of other posts speculating on the race and religion of the jurors, and rife with derogatory slurs, the implication was clear: This was a target list.

The United States was founded as a democratic republic, meaning that people have a right to voice their opinions and to try to bring about change through their vote.  It does not mean that people have a right to threaten or to do harm to others in order to get their way!  Those who would use threats and violence as a means to an end prove only that they are incapable of civil discourse, incapable of expressing their views without threatening everyone who disagrees with them.  This is a nation of 330 million people, not a grade school playground!

Sadly, some elected officials in the Republican Party seem to think that it’s okay for them to stir up the violence in their constituents, to encourage it and treat it as “normal”.  After the terrible violence of January 6^th, some politicians deemed it “normal political discourse”.  The very people who ought to be doing everything in their power to calm the people, to discourage violence, are instead egging it on.  This is the behaviour I would expect in some third-world country … perhaps that’s what the formerly ‘united’ states are becoming.