I've had enough.
I'm not good at waiting around to be victimized. I would never have lasted with Ghandi or MLK. They would have kicked me out. But we're not dealing with a situation that scary. What we are dealing with is a bunch of cowardly bullies. Accordingly, the application of force is pretty much unnecessary.
What I am calling for here is absolutely not violence, but WITNESS. Remember the "Macaca" moment of 2006? That was an overt act of witness. It put Jim Webb in office and gave the Democrats control of the Senate. Think for just a minute how that piece of tape changed history. It's amazing when you think about it from the point of view of someone who didn't grow up with the Internet.
The Tea Partiers MCVEIGH REPUBLICANS are throwing brickbats in the night and sneaking around like roaches. They are making anonymous telephone calls. They are faxing pictures of nooses. They aren't actually showing up in daylight with their faces for anyone to see, for their neighbors to see, for their children's friends' parents to see, for their community to see because they could not withstand the shame.
So, I work for myself now. If you're a lawyer for long enough, it doesn't pay to work for someone else. Nevertheless, I'm not an elected official or even a "prominent" member of my community (though my wife might fit the definition). Still, if I did something like vandalized a community building and got caught, I would never get another piece of work in the small community where I live. If I threw a brick at a County building or spat on a Supervisor or called a local judge a f-g, I would be done with.
Because while far from prominent, I have to be public (except on the Internet (; ). I know that if I was going to do something as cowardly as the McVeigh Republicans are doing, I might see my face on TV in my own nano-Macaca moment.
Let me interject a point from social and evolutionary psychology. People that are scared mostly are easy to chase away. Think about walking your dog. A normal dog will come around and do a little dance with your dog and there might be some barking, but they will come to a dominance equilibrium pretty quickly most of the time. An unbalanced dog will attack even a bigger dog. At the other end of the leash, to keep your dog from getting hurt, you have to grit your teeth, spread your arms, make eye contact and run directly at the menacing dog. The dog picks up on the powerful dominance signals you are sending, and all but the most unbalanced and most well disciplined dogs will run away. It even works on bears sometimes (at least Black Bears).
Humans, for all of our self-aggrandizement, are more or less similar. The McVeigh Republicans are trying to bully not just Congress, but every government employee, through their acts of cowardly violence. When they drive past a community Congressional office and the lights are out and no one is around, they throw the brick. It's dark. No one will know.
But what if someone would know? What if someone was videotaping the area at night or even just standing there with a notepad as a witness? Like the people who were brave enough to walk through the mobs in the 60s (while in no way meaning to draw a comparison), the quiet confidence of doing the right thing sends out all kinds of powerful signals. We are right. We will prevail.
So, the minute I hear anything happening in my neck of the woods, I plan on taking my shitty 2004 camcorder and a tripod, a reading lamp and a book and go hang out for a while near some Democrats office and act as a witness.
If you're in a trouble spot, be safe, but consider being bold. If these clowns realize that there will be blowback, they will chicken out, all but the worst of them. And those are for the authorities to deal with.