Busting Up the Place

"Busting up the place" originated, way way back, with people who were being persecuted without anyone giving a damn, and who had no other channel for protesting their plight.

That's a far cry from busting up the place when the entire society knows about the persecution, and the majority's sympathetic, and you enjoy a rich and diverse set of communication channels. "Busting-up" is not a strategy to keep handy in one's social action toolkit.

Busting up the place is a last resort, not a strategy for advancing an argument. If you'd insist that your justifiable anger makes such action righteous, then I invite you to enjoy the gunfire on election day when Trump's angry followers bust up the place*. This is one of many excesses that can and will come back to bite you.

Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?


* - If, that is, he doesn't cannily use recent events to convince a few thousand people in key electoral college counties of the need for an authoritarian leader amid the chaos, thereby barely eking out reelection.