“If you want a lamb and a tiger to live in the same forest, you don’t try to make them communicate. You cage the bloody tiger.” Edwin Friedman, “The Friendly Forest”
I doubt that anyone - not just the fabled "impartial observer" but any person - Democrat, republican, liberal, conservative, religious or atheist - could watch the videos that the House's Impeachment Managers have shown and remain unmoved or unshaken. The frenzied hate, the mad howls for violence that came from the mob attacking the Capitol were unmistakable signs of a coming Second American Apocalypse.
It has been 207 years since the Capitol was breached,160 years since anyone made a serious attempt to topple the Republic. January 6th was the day that both happened for a second time - and the whole thing was made worse, if that is even possible, by the fact that both were incited by the sitting President of the United States.
We saw in that mob, not rioters, still less protestors, but insurrectionists. Their purpose was not to protest the government but to destroy it. They were neither Republicans nor patriots but the Visigoths; they were the barbarians at the gates. And it was only by the grace of God and the courage of a few hundred Metropolitan and Capitol police that the gates held.
Let us be done with talk of listening to the mob's demands, sympathizing with their concerns or accommodating their needs. We can't listen to their demands for their demands are contradictory and incoherent. We can't sympathize with their concerns for their concerns are only for aggrandizing to themselves the power that rightfully belongs to all the people. We cannot accommodate their needs for what they say they need is your elimination.
As Rabbi Edwin Friedman points out in his wonderful little book, Friedman’s Fables, when a tiger is terrorizing the neighborhood and threatening to eat the other animals, you don’t look for ways to rationalize its behavior and accommodate its needs. You “cage the bloody tiger.”[1]
In this case, caging the tiger means a guilty verdict for Trump, his exclusion from every holding office, again, and heavy sentences for his followers who violated our Capitol.
[1] When I heard Friedman tell the story of “The Friendly Forest” he used a much stronger word than “bloody.”
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