The bully’s only real mistake was that he didn’t realize he was needling the Virginian. He sneered his insinuations, muttered his threats. Then he started describing the long, lanky cowboy in blunt, unpleasant terms. He was about three terms in when he felt the pistol against his ribs.
“You want to call me that,” the Virginian said, his eyes not blinking, “smile.”
How do you decide what you’ll put up with? And for how long?
It’s becoming an over-riding question for many. No matter what our sundry politics, we’re all tired of seeing and hearing what we’re seeing and hearing. Politics consumes everything now. And that’s not going to end, no matter who wins in November.
We watch the news clips of the brutality spinning wildly out of control in city after city after city. The California wildfires are an apt metaphor for the escalating murders – some random, some clearly assassinations – under the absurd guise of “peaceful protest.”
We watch statues fall, the screaming, the burning buildings, the roving mobs. We see churches shut down – some by governors, some by pastors whose courage is not equal to the pressures of a culture that more and more hates God and the things of God and the people of God.
We see athletes and tycoons and actresses and students and candidates smugly presuming the moral high ground while accumulating their millions, their clicks, their campus cred, and their votes over the dead bodies of Chinese minorities, courageous police officers, unborn babies.
We listen to their sneering contempt for those who have cheered them, bought their products, paid for their education, supported their campaigns. In lieu of thanks, they offer nothing but relentless hate and an increasingly brutal arrogance.
In the name of good health, we’ve let petty tyrants and trembling bureaucrats close our schools, seal off our hospitals, decimate our businesses. They’ve taken away our children’s weddings, our parents’ funerals, our haircuts, our travel, and our houses of worship … all while indulging their own excesses, saturating in their paranoia, and funding death and anarchy.
They take away rich life, and offer brittle existence. They take away freedom, demanding blind submission. They obliterate truth, and laugh as they shove the lies down our throats.
They expect us to keep taking it. To burrow into our fear. We don’t want our cars keyed over a bumper sticker, our children punished for wearing the wrong hat, our food spat in because the waitress heard something she didn’t agree with.
For all of us, the line between insult and injury grows perilously thin. In blue cities, it’s been erased entirely. In red cities, a lost election will bring the roof down, the deluge.
How much are we going to take? What are we willing to do to change these things?
We? We. The elected officials will not speak out. The mayors and governors are mostly afraid. Prosecutors are making it clear they won’t prosecute, and police are hamstrung by public scorn and quivering politicos. They’re all only partly to blame.
We live in a country where government “[derives] its just powers from the consent of the governed.” As long as we let the elected tremble and equivocate, we are giving our consent. And we’re fully as guilty as they are.
My friend was nearing the end of a hard-earned vacation, in a summer that has made vacations themselves pretty difficult. She found a restful place on the shores of California, starting her mornings and ending her days the way many of us would like to – with something refreshing on the back deck of her rented condo, looking out toward the endless ocean, feeling the sea breeze in her face.
She had neighbors. A couple about her own age, who shared her sea-watching inclinations. As days went by, they grew chummy. One evening, they invited her to settle a bet: how had she made her living, pre-retirement?
They’d both guessed wrong. She’d worked for a Christian law firm, she said, that defends religious freedom cases. She mentioned a famous client. The husband bristled, squirmed, erupted.
He’d been drinking a bit, and it set his tongue to lashing. He didn’t understand this whole religious freedom thing. Thought the client stuck in his own prejudices. Thought my friend and her former colleagues ridiculously off in their understandings of the Constitution.
My friend listened. Smiled. Reasoned. Endured. But the man went on and on, his wife mortified, his mind oblivious to the ruin he was bringing to the happy fellowship of these last few weeks. My friend graciously put up with it for an hour or so longer than most would have, then bade the two a good night.
Next morning, out on the patio, the wife waited to apologize, profusely. The husband, too, sauntered over, humbly, to confess his boorish sins. My friend’s patient explanations had prompted him to some half-the-night research that showed him she was right, and he was wrong.
Fellowship restored. Still, it had been a long, thoroughly unpleasant evening … enduring his angry ignorance … smiling tight smiles against the inexplicable onslaught. Was it worth it, I asked her, to see him come around right? She smiled, ruefully at first, then with more assurance.
Absolutely, she said.
Would it be worth it to me – to speak up, and draw fire? To smile, keep the tone calm, steady, friendly … but stand the ground? Look them in the eye, and not blink?
It’s either that, or bow.
Surrender the inalienable rights. Let the blessings of liberty die on the vine.
Because what we’re facing now is not going to end – no matter who wins in November. They’ll keep coming.
As long as they have our consent.
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