Us, Them And The Excluded Third

     The problem with two-value logic is that it doesn't scale directly.  It's a handy way to build small widgets; relay logic, TTL and CMOS have been a backbone of my work for decades.  It's great basis for computers, but to get anything done, you have to lay in a machine language and start clocking data and instructions through the hardware; to do anything big, you need to stick a more human-parsable language on top, with an operating system to shovel in coal and an assembler to turn your code into ones and zeros.

     Likewise, out in the world of human interaction, if you want to draw one line down the presumable middle and call one side Us and the other side Them, it doesn't scale worth a damn.  Worse yet, it sticks everyone from your cousin who thinks the rate of social change is too high (and what's with all the pronouns?) to militia members bursting from the back of a rental truck to beat up Pride paraders on one side, and your Granny who wants to have Social Security and Medicare expanded (and why are rich people not taxed more?) to a mob of anarchists, Leftists and looters along for the grabbing taking over a town center on the other.  Cousin and Granny aren't into the violence, despite harsh words at the Thanksgiving table, and they don't approve of it, either.

     Even all that and everything in between manages to leave out the real problem, the real enemy of civil discourse: the muddy thinkers who believe they can assassinate their way to a better world.  Go back to the previous paragraph: even the worst of 'em, Left and Right, aren't directly out to kill.  Intimidate, silence, drive out, injure, steal?  They're often okay with that, and it's not good.  Some of 'em would like to trigger widespread conflict.  But it takes a sharply bent mind to murder like lightning from a cloudless sky.

     When a prominent public figure gets shot, or people in a supermarket or school (etc.), we want it to make sense.  We want the shooter to not be someone from "our" side.  (I sure do!)  Quite often, when the malefactor's politics are known, they're garbled, but yeah, they lean one way or the other.  (And it's a mix if you look at 'em all.)  Nevertheless, the essential difference is, that person thought they could improve their world through murder -- and nearly everyone around you, all of your fellow citizens, the religiously devout and the scoffers, the Left and the Right, the politically active and the people who ignore it, do not agree. Even most of the worst of Us -- and Them -- don't agree.

     There are arguments and frantic sweeping-under-rugs about which "side" is the most violent, including a DOJ report that got yanked from their website.  The reality is, most people are not violent; most politically-active people are not violent, and even most of the persons at the far fringes of Right and Left that do endorse violence draw the line short of assassination and mass murder.  Most people with strong feelings would rather yell at one another, vote at one another, wave signs at one another.  Some of them will throw punches and rocks, break windows, start fires.  And yet they still stop short of killing.

     Trying to pin the blame on political opponents, and then painting that entire side as supporters of it, is false logic.  It's not who they are.  It's not even who the worst of them are.  It serves to legitimize increased political violence in return; it makes all of Us -- and Them -- worse.  And the excluded third category, lone wolves divorced from normal logic, normal social strictures, normal morality and ethics, are still around, like sparks from a fire.  We can pour water on the sparks -- or gasoline.