Gratitude Monday: FTS

Here are a few thoughts about the events in Charlottesville over the weekend:

White supremacist neo-Nazi thugs showed up in military-manqué cammos, with their tiki torches and assault weapons, industrial-strength CS gas and riot shields, to proclaim their outrage at the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a public park. 

(The angry white racist to the right, Peter Cvjetanovic, 20, a student at the University of Nevada, Reno, has since told media repeatedly that he's not an angry, shouting white racist, but a white supremacist who "as a white nationalist, [he cares] about all people."

Underlying their outrage is the Make-America-White-Again Weltanschauung that life is a pie, and that any part of that pie that goes to someone else means less for themselves.

They waved Confederate and Nazi flags proudly, apparently unaware of the irony that the last flags raised by both Confederates and Nazis were white, and represented unconditional surrender.

Anti-racist protestors showed up carrying hand-made signs.

So, when violence broke out, including the ramming of chanting, sign-carrying anti-fascist marchers by a car, killing Heather Heyer, 32, and injuring many others…

…what would a reasonable observer conclude about where responsibility lies? On “many sides”?

(At the time of writing, there are three dead: Heyer, killed by the car driven by James Alex Fields, Jr., and two Virginia State Troopers, whose helicopter crashed into trees near the city  on Saturday afternoon.)

Also: if a few hundred non-white people showed up—just showed up, not carrying weapons of any kind—in any city in the nation, what are the odds that police forces from multiple jurisdictions would have been deployed to arrest them at the slightest misstep (“Littering, Joe—they’re tossing their gum wrappers in our streets! Round ‘em up.”), probably before they’d got a couple of hundred yards?

Assuming they were even granted a parade permit.

So, why were Charlottesville (and Albemarle County) cops so notable by their absence? Starting with the tiki-torchlight parade-and-rally Friday night, and into the appalling events of Saturday—what, exactly, were they doing?

(Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe has since defended the [non-]actions of the police by saying they were outgunned by the Nazis. Which is a load of crap. Outgunned, assuredly, but why? You knew these thugs were coming, and you knew they would be armed to the teeth. Have you never heard of preparing? Badly done, Virginia. Badly done.)

Well, it’s Gratitude Monday. They say that the very act of trying to find something to be thankful for (even if you fail) is a key to happiness. So here’s what I’m grateful for:

Those fat, pathetic, losers with compensation issues in their paramilitary dress-up clothes limited their willie-waving to spraying CS gas, beating people with poles and killing only one person (may her memory be a blessing); at least they did not start firing their weapons into the crowds.

This time.