When George Floyd died, they burnt down cities.
When one of our own is killed, we hold a candlelight vigil.
We are not the same.
Let’s not pretend we are. Let’s not sit here and sing Kumbaya and talk about “common ground.” The ground between us isn’t common anymore. It’s a goddamn no-man’s-land, a cratered, smoking, and completely impassable field of fire.
When their guy died, a man with a rap sheet as long as my arm and a belly full of fentanyl, they had a festival. A goddamn carnival of righteous indignation. They took to the streets in a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest ecstasy of rage. They burned, they looted, they tore down the statues of men whose boots they weren’t worthy to lick. And the whole time, the people in charge, the ones with the soft hands and the clean suits, they called it a “summer of love.” They called it “mostly peaceful.” They got on their knees and washed the feet of the arsonists.
It wasn’t about grief. It was about power. It was the beautiful, terrifying, and completely intoxicating feeling of being on the right side of a holy war. It was a release. A goddamn orgasm of destruction.
And when our guy dies? A man who was killed, not by a cop with a bad knee, but by the quiet, creeping poison of a culture that has decided he is the enemy? A man who was shot in the neck for the crime of saying the wrong words in the wrong place?
We hold a vigil.
We stand in a quiet, orderly line, with our little paper cups and our flickering candles. We sing a few sad, polite songs. We listen to a few sad, polite speeches. We hug each other. And then we go home, and we post a sad, polite message on the internet about how “violence is never the answer.”
What a load of horseshit.
We are not the same.
They are fighting a war. We are attending a goddamn funeral. And it’s our own.
You want to know why? You want the real, ugly, beautiful truth of it?
It’s because they still believe in something. They believe in their cause, in their tribe, in their own righteous, and completely bullshit, version of the world. They believe that they are the heroes of their own movie, the plucky little rebels fighting against an evil empire. And when you believe you’re a hero, you can justify any goddamn thing.
Burning down a city is just a special effect in the grand, glorious movie of your own revolution.
And us? What do we believe in?
We believe in the rules. We believe in civility. We believe in a quiet, orderly, and completely imaginary world where the other side is going to play fair. We’re sitting at a chess board, politely planning our next move, while they’ve flipped the whole goddamn table over, set the pieces on fire, and are currently beating us to death with the board.
We’re paralyzed by our own decency. We’re terrified of being called names. “Racist,” “fascist,” “Nazi.” They’ve taken good, strong, ugly words and they’ve turned them into a series of beautiful, effective, and completely soul-crushing cages. And we’re so afraid of being put in one of those cages that we won’t even raise our goddamn voices while they’re dragging us to the gallows.
We have become a nation of good, quiet, and completely respectable corpses. We’re the good Germans, pretending we don’t know where the trains are going, because making a scene would be impolite.
That’s the difference. They are a pack of wild, beautiful, and completely dangerous animals, and we are a flock of fat, comfortable, and completely doomed sheep. They are the fire, and we are the ones holding the goddamn candles, wondering why the room is getting so hot.
So you have to make a choice.
You have to look at the burning city and the quiet vigil, and you have to decide which animal you are.
The one that burns the whole goddamn world down just to feel warm for a night.
Or the one that stands in the cold, holding a candle, quietly and politely waiting for the flame to go out.
We are not the same.
And that, right there, that’s the whole beautiful, ugly, and completely honest tragedy of it all.
