I wrote that I would publish my assessment of the troubles in Minnesota, and I will, but I need a bit more time because it is developing into a longer essay than I expected. Part of the difficulty is that I am thinking about the situation in the context of the post-9/11 and post-COVID-19 American dilemma as a whole and not just isolated to the sad events of last week.
After the political activist Charlie Kirk was murdered last year, I wrote that the horrific event was about something bigger than free speech. It was about the dehumanization of Kirk by his murderer and other detractors who denied his right to live. Again, a public death is leading to public dehumanization of the deceased. This is unhealthy and reminds me of the mindset in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
Charlie Kirk was not a martyr for free speech. It is worse than that.
When opponents become less than human, law cannot hold the line alone.
During the Irish Troubles, the British Army was deployed to defeat the Irish republican insurgents and establish law and order so that the UK government could find a political solution that kept Northern Ireland in the Union with Great Britain. It took thirty years because as the conflict progressed, the two communities—republican Irish versus British loyalist—became as a British Ministry of Defense study argued “victims of their own views; moderate political opinion, compromise and often logic has largely been marginalised.”1 (Emphasis mine)
This view of identity conflicts shaped my subsequent research at Howard University and still strikes me as true. When people see reality through the lens of an identity conflict, they prioritize whether taking a particular position would be a betrayal of their identity or cost their “side” something, and they stop thinking rationally about what is happening.
The same attitude that broke Northern Ireland is dismantling our shared reality concerning Minneapolis and ICE, and about Venezuela, Cuba, Canada, Greenland, Russia and Ukraine, government benefits fraud, and so on. Renee Nicole Good was a human being before the opposing sides labeled her one thing or the other. If acknowledging the humanity of the “other” is seen as weakness, then cruelty will be mistaken for strength. Northern Ireland lost two generations of history to that madness; we do not need to follow that pattern.
We do not have to be Rome, 1930s Spain or Germany, the Soviet Union, the British Empire, or any other past example currently in vogue in the minds of those fearing our imminent collapse.
We can refuse to be the bitter victims of our own tribal views.
We can choose to be Americans and be the exception to the troubles.
Operation Banner: An Analysis of Military Operations in Northern Ireland published in 2006