What If No One Came to See It?

"Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come."-- Carl Sandburg

Racists. White supremacists. Anti fa. Communists. Black separatists. Anti-Muslim. Socialists. Neo-Nazis. Republicans. Democrats. Black Panthers. Black Lives Matter. KKK. LGBTQ (Add more letters as applicable).

Imagine if you had a group of white supremacists and neo-nazis or any other group standing around a statue of a figure from the southern side of the American Civil War. Imagine they are chanting hate-speech or other offensive things to the area surrounding this statue. Imagine they are dressed in attire that reflects their stance, brandishing signs with offensive slogans and are waving flags of a racist and offensive matter.

Are you mad yet? Then their tactics worked. And the human species suffered because of it.

Time for a brief disclaimer: I am for free speech. I will defend your right to it. Offensive speech generally turns me off from that speakers perspective. As Evelyn Beatrice Hall said (though this is often attributed to Voltaire): I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Why engage these people at all? Why not ignore them? Do we need to know that when a tree falls in the forest it makes a noise, or if bears shit in the woods? Or if someone is spouting hate speech that there is anyone to hear it? What these groups do when they are engaged is turn their opposition into the aggressor, when they are the ones that are usually the lovers of peace.

Did the likes of Gandhi, the Dali Llama and Martin Luther King not teach people anything?

So many questions.

I would offer this to ponder about. Suppose you consider that before man existed, conflict waited. The ultimate practice of conflict awaiting man, the ultimate practitioner of conflict. Now apply it to current events of violent nature that all to frequently abound in the world.

Then throw in a televised news feed and some talking heads to fuel the fire.

Recipe for Charlottesville.