You’re not safe. Life isn’t safe. The world isn’t safe. But you can’t live hiding under the rug. And some things are worth doing. Square your shoulders, decide what you have to do. Then do it. Death will come either from it or from merely living. Death is the price of being alive. * * * As for “We can’t reconcile.” and “We can’t share a nation with people like this.” Well, your ancestors did. After the revolution, after the civil war, wounds were bound, and people learned to live together, even though each had done horrible things to the others. You will too. And most of them not-media-personalities are mostly dumb, lied to and histrionic. Which is bad enough, but not evil incarnate.
You're not the first to face this
Via Instapundit, Sarah Hoyt:
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3 comments:
After the revolution, after the civil war, wounds were bound, and people learned to live together, even though each had done horrible things to the others.
Not wrong but reconciliation happened mostly because enough horrible things were done *to them* that the people who advocated and committed violence decided it wasn't working. See also Germany and Japan in 1945. There is no peaceful solution when people think violence is working for them.
This is a very thematic post for the Hall.
In Iraq, I often sat down and ate with men who’d been trying to kill us not long ago. Christopher is right; this was the Surge and just after, and we had successfully conveyed that there was at least more benefit to working with us than fighting us.
At that point it wasn’t too difficult to reconcile. You still have to give them a reason to reconcile. Even the victors of the Civil War ended up giving a lot back by the Redemption period of the 1870s. Some of what they gave back was easy for them but very hard on Black Americans in the South. We mostly gave access to money and jobs, and guarantees that we’d protect them. If we’d kept our word about the latter, Iraq would be a happier place; but the Obama administration and the Clinton State Department chose to walk away from it.
I think the transgender activists in particular feel like they’re fighting for their very survival, and as Sun Tzu points out it’s dangerous to engage in an enemy’s Death Ground because they will be driven to greater effort and effect. It’s often wiser to offer a road of retreat, which is another sort of ‘giving them something.’ So far neither side has been willing to compromise on this issue, and there aren’t all that many of them so outright victory is possibly an option (if expensive). On the other hand, the Agency has often organized that community in other nations— Burma, for example, had significant USAID funding directed at organizing and supporting its trans community — which implies that they were thought to be useful weapons if needed. Like the Sacred Banders of Ancient Greece, perhaps.
Maybe it would be a good idea to start thinking what the reconciliation compromises might be. Nobody’s ready for them yet, but that’s the road to peace when the time comes.
Yes, but in the transgender case, we didn't push them into a corner. They talked themselves into a corner with all their talk of trans genocide and now some of them think they need to shoot their way out.
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