OPEN LETTER TO A MOB
When you think you are independent you must examine how you have been influenced. When you act on what you believe you must question your conclusions. Do you honestly believe you have not been manipulated? That you arrived shouting from your platform without someone having steered you there?
Do you believe your thoughts are your own? Or that the brick you threw was driven only by your arm?
Sooner or later you will have to ask whether you are fighting the right enemy.
You must consider that your energy has been harnessed and directed toward targets of someone else's choosing, that your fervor might be misdirected and you may have been coopted into soldiering for a cause you do not understand. You must consider that your actions will have consequences you cannot predict, even in the immediate, which matters less than the effects that manifest in ten years, or twenty, or might have to be unfucked by your offspring.
You think you see the target. I know that I do not see it yet. We observe a multi-headed snake, its many forked tongues, intentional obfuscation, tantrum-like rattles and threats, and the too-frequent sleights of hand a snake should not possess. These sleights and misdirection make you look the other way, or blindly accept the way of the mob, and move along with it despite its lack of accurate sight or post-violence vision. The mob pulses and your heart beats with it, to it. You follow. Swept up and way. But when the mob destroys, its collective momentum also bulldozes your desire to create, to remodel, and to build something better in place of what no longer exists.
You will be trampled or cancelled should you resist. Or speak differently. So you take it. You ride together. You match their shouts with your own. The myopic thinking convinces you that you are confronting the right enemy, and that modern revisionism can rewrite history. And simultaneously teach it.
The mob shrieks that what once was accepted can no longer be ... but the syrupy sweetness of smashing monuments does not rewrite our country's bloodied and often-bitter past. No individual's life is or ever will be judged as perfect and some acts prove more positive, more useful, and more powerful and empowering than others.
After all, if it weren’t for the Declaration of Independence you dumb motherfuckers wouldn’t even be here to tear down a statue of Thomas Jefferson, one of its five authors.
