by: Rob Yates, LPNC Communications Director, LPA

A Plea for Peace

For much of elementary school, I was bullied. It was mostly taunting and harassment, occasionally physical, but it was constant. The summer between sixth and seventh grade, I hit a growth spurt. I could now back up six years of self-defense training, and so, on the first day of seventh grade, one of my primary antagonists started in on me right away, and I smashed his face into the bathroom wall hard enough to crack a tile. I got in trouble, but I never got picked on again. 

After that, I got in far more than my fair share of fights. I never started them (my mom would probably dispute that statement, but it doesn't count if it's your siblings!), but I never backed down either. I loved violence. I loved wrestling and martial arts as much as I loved street fights, and I never passed up the opportunity to test my mettle.  

As much as I relished the adrenaline rush that came with interpersonal combat, I also received positive feedback as I learned quickly how useful violence could be. Simply having the reputation of being proficient and willing when it came to violence was an absurdly effective way to get what you wanted. It was a driver for popularity, attention, girls, and more. Further, it was ironically sometimes a catalyst for peace - or something like it, as people were not necessarily interested in testing their own penchant for violence, and just the looming threat of a fight could drive a non-violent solution to the problem of getting my way, for good or for bad. 

This is not an outcome unique to my puerile affinity for fistfights. The Vikings' entire culture was based on extreme violence as a means to get what they wanted. The Incas and the Mayans were the same. The entire Dark Ages was based around the church using violence to enforce its morality, peaking with the Inquisition. Islam still rigorously enforces is morals today in large parts of the world with violence. Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan both set out to violently conquer the world, and were both largely successful in creating empires. Police in the United States today notoriously use violence as the first means of demanding people obey their commands regardless of legality and civil rights. 

One of the greatest motivators for violence throughout history has been freedom. Rising up and casting off the shackles of oppression and unjust rule - real or perceived - spurred Spartacus and the Roman slaves, William Wallace and much of Scotland, the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, Mao, and the colonists of a strange new world only recently discovered by Europeans - leading to the holiday we celebrate today. 

I'm cherry-picking from the thousands of examples over the entire expanse of known human history where violence was used by a person or group of people to get what they want. We only see the use of violence as a means to an end so frequently because it is such an effective means. Of course, many of these examples resulted in new governing frameworks that were far worse than what they replaced, especially communism, and, to a lesser extent, fascism (in scope, not in ideology - they are equally repugnant authoritarian nightmares). "Violence begets violence" consistently proves itself a reliable maxim, and the threat of violence backed up by the visible specter of decisive action is the only way tyrants stay in power. 

Late in college, I was at a house party put on by friends. A big group of guys showed up and started smashing bottles and aggressively harassing people, particularly inappropriately with the ladies. We told them to leave, and escorted them out. They resisted, and the situation escalated explosively once we got outside the house. Within a few moments, there was a brawl in the street with maybe 60 people fighting, and I was right in the middle of it. 

Some guy came charging at me, and 15 years of obsessive training kicked in. I tossed him, feet to the sky, and slammed him to the pavement, headfirst, with a sickening "thwack." He didn't move for what couldn't have been more than ten seconds, but it was the ten longest seconds of my life, especially when blood trickled out from under him. 

He got up and stumbled off, and I stopped fighting then right then and there. I had learned before that violence could get you what you wanted. Now I understood truly the potentially terrible price of destruction that was the cost. The virtue of violence as a means to an end exacted a heavy toll, and I no longer wanted to risk it. 

Now, I'm actively seeking peace as a means and an end, which is why I'm so active in the Libertarian Party. I'm not naive - I'm well aware, perhaps more than most, of how real and immediate violence can be in our world, and I'm fully prepared to defend against it with any means necessary to protect the people I love. 

Nevertheless, I will fight a hard as I can to avoid violence as an outcome, on an individual or societal scale, because I know firsthand what violence leaves in its wake. You almost have to know what that looks like to fully understand how bad it can be. Ask any soldier who's been in combat if s/he wants to see violence break out here. Ask what mass violence looks like and what it does to you to be part of it. 

We live in a country founded on ideals that comprise the greatest social achievement to date in all of human history. Yet we fail to live up to our own simple, yet ambitious and monumental concept that Liberty matters more than anything else, and that no person or government has the authority to deny anyone's Liberty to achieve its own ends. Instead, we embrace violence against others because they're different - immigrants, Christians, MAGA, leftists, gays, blacks, rednecks, trans, trads... there is no end to the litany of identity groups where we pigeonhole people so that we can dehumanize them and justify the violence perpetuated against them by an increasingly tyrannical and aggressive state. 

Eventually, the dam will burst, and real violence will break out. No one wins in this situation. It won't be on TV, it will be outside our homes, in the streets. You won't be able to escape it, and you or people you love will suffer or die. 

This is not inevitable. There are still paths out of this through peaceful means, but they are growing increasingly more distant. Success requires commitment, organizing, and sacrifice, and there will necessarily be some compromise. Staying perfectly principled is possible in the real world, but it might look a little conflicted. 

Nevertheless, better to appear conflicted or compromise than to engage in actual conflict. We are a people forged in the fires of two major rebellions where we rose up and announced to the word that the United States of America would not suffered the indignities of forced bondage, and freedom would ring her clarion call from sea to shining sea. Now, we go from one tyrant president who scoffed at the right to self-defense and attempted to institutionalize the policing of speech to another who has simply abandoned even the pretext of respecting the rights guaranteed under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, the latest in a long line of administrations who have allowed for domestic spying, extra-legal police action, forced taking of property, and zero accountability for the gestapo that enforces their respective manifestations of tyranny. 

Today is a perfect day to remember our violent roots, and the price that we sometimes pay for freedom. Enjoy the celebrations, watch fireworks, wear your American flag colors. Then realize how much closer we have drifted to the tactics of Stalin and Hitler, and take peaceful action to take our power back so that we are not forced to do so again with violence in the future.