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Our nation is embroiled in the fall-out from a tragedy brewed from familiar ingredients. Once again, an innocent child is dead, a victim of some undetermined blend of cowboy conservativism, racism, and laws which weaken the state’s crucial monopoly on the legitimate use of deadly force.

There is no shortage of lessons to be learned from the murder of Trayvon Martin, an innocent and unarmed black teen walking home from the store, the culprit protected by a Florida law that effectively legalizes murder, as long as the perpetrator thought the person he was murdering might be a criminal (letting each be the police, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, all on their own. So much for “due process…”). To those who insist that they are not racists because racism is dead, it isn’t, and some of you are. To those who insist that liberty and justice require decentralizing the legal right to –and discretionary judgment as to when to– use deadly violence, you are liberating only human folly, and doing so at the cost of innocent others’ most fundamental of rights, the right to life.

The far right insists that if we, as a polity, try to take care of one another through our agent, the state, it is the most antagonistic thing imaginable to individual liberty, but that being able to kill an innocent teen, because he has dark skin and wears a hoodie, in response to some racist impulse, is the most necessary thing imaginable to that same liberty. If that were what the word “liberty” really meant, then it would be an odious thing. But it isn’t, neither what it means nor what it is.

“Liberty” is the freedom to speak your mind, believe and express those beliefs, organize, assemble, aspire, innovate, prosper, and thrive. It is not the freedom to harm others, to hurl our nation into a Hobbesian paradise of a “war of all against all,” in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” It is not the freedom to kill an unarmed teen because he’s black and wears a hoodie. It’s not even the freedom to be left to make that choice, each using his or her own judgment whether this or that individual deserves to be killed, in any circumstance other than truly imminent necessity of the defense of self or others.

That we have an ideology reverberating through large swathes of our collective consciousness that ever was foolish enough to blurr that bright line is proof enough that something is horribly amiss, and we are in urgent need of correcting it.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

  • sblecher:

    It’s clear that the far right believes in the rule of law—- Law of the jungle, that is.

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