“The right to swing my arms in any direction ends where your nose begins,” children would sometimes hear years ago, from teachers trying to illustrate the rightful balance of rights. Much like the “sticks and stones may break my bones” free-speech lesson, however, it’s not related to kids much anymore.
It shows, too.
The latest example is how a pro-Palestinian, pro-Muslim mob — some of whose members reportedly yelled “Allahu Akbar!” (Allah is the Greatest!) — shut down an Interstate 40 bridge between Arkansas and Tennessee last Saturday, leaving thousands of motorists stranded for what some sources say were hours.
Moreover, this malicious act was enabled, say critics, by law enforcement, which didn’t act swiftly and surely to deter the mob.
Of course, it’s only people driving around releasing CO2 and is no big deal, right?
That is, unless you’re a parent running back home because your child has been injured, an on-call OB/GYN rushing to deliver a baby, an emergency vehicle requiring passage, or anyone else with a serious reason to quickly get where he’s going.
And all the way around, the mob was responsible for lost productivity and the wasting of gasoline (how much extra pollution is released when motorists must sit in traffic?).
Memphis police first received calls about the “disturbance” on the Hernando de Soto Bridge at 3:10 p.m. CST. The span crosses the Mississippi River and connects West Memphis, Arkansas, to Memphis, Tennessee.
The group Memphis Voices for Palestine held the protest, “which halted traffic on I-40 and the Mississippi River bridge for miles Saturday afternoon into the evening hours,” reports WZTV – Nashville. “The group is calling for a ceasefire to the fighting between Israel and Palestine.”
The mob also “chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and carried Palestinian flags,” commentator Todd Starnes states. “They also chanted, ‘From the river to the sea….’”
And, of course, their agenda is apparently so important that they have a right to swing their arms and bloody noses as much as they darn well please. This is the Age of Narcissism, after all.
The exception is when a (possible) narcissistic desire happens to coincide with a moral imperative and exercise of legitimate rights. As Starnes further informs:
KWAM News Radio host Earle Farrell was returning from a fishing trip and was stuck on the Arkansas side of the bridge.
“There are 5,000 motorists who are ready to physically remove them from the bridge,” Farrell said during the radio station’s live coverage.
The Tennessee Highway Patrol and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office assisted in clearing the bridge and it reopened to traffic late into the evening.
“There were no arrests made today in connection with the protest,” the police said in a statement.
Citizens were outraged and demanded to know who gave orders not to arrest the domestic terrorists who trapped innocent motorists on the interstate.
Here’s a question, too: If those 5,000 motorists had done the job the authorities wouldn’t do (in a timely way) and had removed the extremists, do you think there wouldn’t have been arrests?
It wasn’t always like this. In the old West, the law sometimes wasn’t strong enough to ensure domestic tranquility, so the citizenry might step into the breach and create “vigilance committees” (ergo the term “vigilante”). The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851 was an example.
Back then, however, the given authorities simply weren’t capable of quelling crime. Today we have the worst of both worlds: The government has the power but not the priorities. The authorities don’t have the will to crack down on criminals — but they have the power and the will to crack down on those who dare defend others or even themselves from criminals. Cases in point are Kyle Rittenhouse and Mark and Patricia McCloskey.
This results from moral decay, which leads to both effeteness and ideological corruption and prejudice. Regarding the latter, the government was more than willing to put the January 6 protesters through the wringer, to the point of violating their rights. In contrast, Antifa and Black Lives Matter (or those sympathetic to them) were allowed to run rampant; in 2020 alone, they perpetrated 600-plus violent riots, causing billions in property damage and killing dozens of people.
We can for now weather these collective, establishment-enabled temper tantrums because we’re still wealthy enough (living on borrowed money and time) to rebuild. This may not always be the case, though.
In reality, eliminating riots isn’t difficult (a lot easier than trying to expel Russia from Ukraine). Professor Thomas Sowell explained this in 2006, pointing out that even “during the 1960s, riots were far more common and deadly in liberal bastions like New York City than in Chicago.” Why?
Because the Windy City’s “original Mayor Richard Daley [a Democrat, mind you] announced on television that he had given his police orders to ‘shoot to kill’ if riots broke out,” Sowell continued.
“Daley was demonized for saying such a thing, even though Chicago did not have the loss of life suffered in liberal cities where mayors pandered to grievance-mongers and pleaded for restraint,” Sowell added. “In other words, the net effect was that Daley saved lives while liberals saved their vision.”
Know, too, that we will get back to this — one way or the other. After all, history shows that the kind of left-wing regime our day’s Kronstadt sailors are enabling wouldn’t tolerate unrest. The difference is that it won’t shoot those doing evil, but those opposing its own evil. It will swing its arms as it pleases, no matter whose nose is in the way.
