Neither you nor I support violence, rioting, etc. There is no justification for mob action.

I do not attack the author. I have followed you for sometime, and find you to be a thoughtful, sincere thinker and writer.

I think the question for us both may be, which of the left or right most promotes by their rhetoric fear and violence that appears to support and encourage mob action and the resulting violence. Both left and right have been seduced by the use of irrational rhetoric. Each side vilifying the other is a formula for dangerous conflict, yet both sides seem to fear that rational comment and the offering of an olive branch of common good would be take as a sign of weakness and uncertainty of the merits of their cause.

If our national rhetoric continues to deteriorate into vitriolic cheer leading, we are poluting our talent for reasoned disagreement that states thesis and antithesis in the pursuit of synthesis. Both sides now vocalize the impossibility of synthesis.

Mob violence, whatever it’s claimed philosophical reason to be is, by it’s nature, insane, incapable of exercising reason and judgement, drunk on it’s own self stimulated emotion.

For either of us to categorically chose left or right for general condemnation is to slip into the role to which each wishes us to play.

My concern is that intelligent people, sincere in their efforts to bring balance to our badly out of balance society, seem to think that one side must be glorified and the other condemned. This is the contagious nature of irrational, emotionally charged effort to simplify a problem that has haunted society forever reducing conflict to “good vs. evil”. This is primitive thinking.

You and I are both above this.

I will never fault or criticize a man of integrity, being you. And, yes, there was considerable tongue in cheek in my commentary. The danger of any purposely overstated effort toward satirical comment today is that so much of our rhetoric from both sides is so over the top absurd that satire is a disappearing art, too often conflated into serious commentary. We lose significant opportunities for laughter, and I bet you agree, we all could use daily doses of laughter, at ourselves and those foolish enough to agree with us.

“Come, let us sit together and talk”. Let not respectful dialectic be slain by the visceral enjoyment of conflict.

Thanks for your thoughtful, polite response to my comments.

Rip