The irony of the violent attempt on Donald Trump’s life

America’s institutions are flawed. So are our political systems in  Guam and the CNMI. Democracy is flawed. Voters sometimes choose the lesser qualified guy. Voters sometimes pass up the chance to be led by a woman of extraordinary talent and resolve.

We make these mistakes for a bunch of different reasons.

Some of us are assholes who can’t see past the I’ll-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine racket that happens right in front of our faces. Some of us are too stupid to see the raging narcissist or sociopath playing to our emotions and conning us against our conscience. Some of us are racist and sexist; some outwardly, but most will never admit that. Some of us are citizens to the bone, doing our job to know the issues and assign proper judgment to vote for the candidates who make the compelling case to do what is right by us. And, if we’re being real, we can fall into any of these categories in any given election. Let’s call us Group A.

The minority of voters cling to one of the political parties and will rationalize away the misconduct of elephant candidates or donkey candidates or a platform prong that clearly is wrong. Then there are fewer of them who hold on to ideology so tightly, there is no room for discourse that leads to truth. This is Group B.

And for whatever reason, many times Group A has allowed Group B to set the course of our islands and our country. Many times, that has been because a lot of people in Group A didn’t vote.

Sadly, how society typically acts in the voting booth, is how society has acted about violence.

There’s a Group A that hates violence and loves the rule of law. Then there’s a Group B that is latently fascist and wanting a Russian system of criminal justice, a desire for Christian supremacy that matches the Iranian contempt for religious freedom, and a Duterte regime where you can shoot drug dealers and make journalists disappear. The problem isn’t that Group A is the majority, it’s that Group A is the SILENT majority.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu

A would-be assassin Saturday tried to kill Donald Trump, and did murder one of his supporters: Corey Comperatore. We shouldn’t expect something like this to happen in America. We’re supposed to settle our politics in the ballot box, not through a rifle. Yet, so often throughout our neighborhoods and even by the police, are disputes handled unjustly by violence.

We will have gained nothing if the outcry stops at the defense of Donald Trump. If anything, this dark moment in American history should be used to highlight the hypocrisy of both political parties, and of those who remained silent in our contemporary time, when so much violence has happened and been incited.

Some of the people rightfully condemning the violence against Mr. Trump are the same people who defended Derek Chauvin after he murdered George Floyd with impunity. One of the biggest rationalizations made to defend Mr. Chauvin was that Mr. Floyd was a criminal with a criminal record. So is Mr. Trump. The only differences are that George Floyd died, and Donald Trump has a criminal record of 34 felonies, far more than Floyd had.

But it isn’t just the MAGA right we should call into question. So many Democrats in elected office throughout the country – and even in Guam and the CNMI – failed to condemn the violence that literally burned down cities during the protests that ensued following Floyd’s murder. Some even celebrated that violence. How can anyone justify – not simply qualify – violence as a response to murder? Where were the Democratic parties in Guam and the CNMI in condemning the violence.

Where were our Republican parties in decrying the violent January 6 insurrection?

Where are both parties in regulating the enormous police power of the state and reining in police brutality?

I used to wish violence on my enemies. I’ve since learned about myself that that came from my insecurities and my unwillingness to be a good citizen with a Christian heart.

Our prisons are filled with non-violent drug users while rapists and human traffickers walk free. Violent drug traffickers are unrelenting because of the powerful and corrupt people in power who protect them or abet their money laundering. Where is the outrage?

Unfortunately and apparently, it’s being used solely to condemn the violence against one person. And, ironically, it is the same person who has repeatedly called for violence.

“Can’t you just shoot them?” Mr. Trump was quoted by his Defense Secretary Mark Esper as saying in a reaction to protesters outside the White House in 2017. “Just shoot them in the legs or something.”

He celebrated the Montana governor’s assault on a reporter during a campaign rally in 2018, saying “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type.” Sounds a little closet gay if you ask me.

In 2019 the New York Times uncovered Trump’s strategies to deal with undocumented people at the borders. Those plans included water-filled trenches with snakes or alligators. He also wanted to shoot them in the legs. Most of the undocumented are women and children.

Amid the riots following George Floyd’s murder, he tweeted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

He wanted to use the military against its own citizens because they were one color: Black. This was in 2020 in response to Black Lives Matter protests. A year later, he threatened to kill protests “in 45 minutes” in Portland by sending in the National Guard.

In September of 2020 during the first presidential debate, Mr. Trump refused to condemn white supremacist violence and instead told the far-right Proud Boys they should “stand back and stand by.”

Stand by they did, waiting for January 6 to violently attack the Capitol and send members of Congress running for their lives while he sat in the White House inciting their violence and waiting to see whether they would succeed in overturning the decision of hundreds of millions of Americans at the ballot box.

It’s colorful watching people who have either remained silent, or have excused and rationalized violence in America – including crimes incited by Mr. Trump himself – now bemoan the violent attempt on his life. As though it is the only violence that matters and deserves attention.

America remains the greatest country in the world. Nowhere else on this earth can 300 million citizens – however divided by their individual or systemic prejudice – of every color and creed spread from one end of the western hemisphere through the vast Pacific to the other end enjoy the equal protection of the law, the civilian rule of the strongest military ever conceived, and he security of property. We enjoy  the promise of opportunity that ranges from welfare to venture capital. We hold steadfast to the right of journalists to take down the corrupt and the criminal. And as citizens, we have the power to command the state from the jury box to release the enslaved against whom the state could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt the crime with which he was accused.

Last Saturday, we got a little closer to being a state indistinguishable from nations struggling with democracy and teetering on the edge of autocratic rule. And, ironically, it set the stage for the democratic election of a man who has so fervently maneuvered a corporate and political empire from what this country used to value in democracy.

The thing is that unlike any other place in the world, this melting pot of a country gives to each of the colors in that pot an equal stake in its future through free and fair elections. And in between those elections, we each get a chance to say to each other nearly anything we want to say without fear of reprisal from the state. So many people in other parts of the world – even in places where governments are elected – don’t enjoy that same freedom. For many citizens of the world, violence truly is the answer. It shouldn’t be in America.

If you believe, as I do, that no attempt ever should have been made on Donald Trump’s life and that all of us deserve the equal protection of the law, then truth demands your voice against the January 6 violent insurrection, the murder of George Floyd, the riots that consumed cities, the invasion of Ukraine, the war in the middle east, the persecution of Jewish and Arab alike, police brutality, human trafficking, and the several times Donald Trump has advocated violence against people and institutions.

You can’t cherry pick when or against whom violence is okay in the America designed by the Constitution. You’re either an American who stands up for justice under the rule of law against violence, or you’re a fascist who hypocritically wants to crown a criminal and a thug.

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According to Wikipedia: Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.