Minimum Requirements

     It’s occasionally been my lot to need the answer to a pressing question for which no “stock” answer seems applicable. One such question runs thus:

     “What’s the minimum I need to do or not do, to say or not say, if I’m to avoid an unacceptable deterioration to my current situation?”

     Questions of personal standards often play into the answer: specifically, how to avoid compromising them. Compromising one’s standards is “a short route to chaos.” (Cf. A Man for All Seasons.) It’s highly likely to bring sorrow at a later time. The twin constraints can be difficult to meet.

     Now, as it happens – this will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been a Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch for more than a few minutes – I’m a Catholic. I do have a few differences with the Church. Nevertheless, I’m serious about my faith. For a brief glimpse at how serious, read the vignette I provide here. It’s one of the things on which I refuse to compromise.

     But it’s seldom been required of anyone to compromise his personal faith, or his personal political opinions, or anything else that's his by right for the sake of public order. (Seldom, not “never.”) That is, until recently.

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     Via the esteemed Mike Hendrix comes an article of which I’d not be aware except for his citation thereof:

     When I saw Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt in a tea house last week, I walked up to him and told him to resign. Three days later, he was gone. I obviously can’t claim credit for his departure, which was long in the making. But I would like to think I provided a helpful nudge....

     Some say it wasn’t “civil” of me to approach Pruitt at lunch and that it’s a sign of dark times ahead for our political climate. But these arguments are not genuine: The bogus “civility” argument has arisen because conservatives are losing on the content of the arguments....

     After I told Scott Pruitt that he was bad for the environment and that he was taking handouts from energy lobbyists, Pruitt’s office made sure to tell the press that he had said “thank you” to me. What they didn’t say is telling. They didn’t offer any substantive defense of his policies. They’d rather keep the focus on civility than the serious repercussions of their actions on our planet.

     Now this Kristin Mink person is plainly not honest. (Granted, the article’s provenance was reason to suspect that ab initio.) It’s the Left that has lost the battle of ideas, having no substantive arguments for its policy preferences in the face of the massive empirical evidence against them. It’s the Left that has resorted to harassment, intimidation, and street violence to suppress expressions of conservative or libertarian sentiment. It’s the Left that’s been issuing calls for “civility,” as they find themselves on the receiving end of tactics comparable to those.

     But dishonesty is normal on the Left. Anyone with enough functioning gray matter to graduate from middle school can’t accept the Left’s prescriptions on a rational or evidentiary basis. It takes the deliberate suppression of one’s rationality, coupled to a willful blindness toward the evidence, to remain firmly in the Left’s camp.

     Despite all that, there are many Leftists among us: in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, in our schools, in the news and entertainment media, even in the businesses we patronize...though given their lunatic opinions about economics, how a Leftist could make a business work remains a conundrum. That makes it necessary to ask oneself the question I posed above, with slightly more specificity:

     “What’s the minimum I need to do or not do, to say or not say, if I’m to avoid unacceptable consequences stemming from my need to coexist with this person?”

     The answer can be elusive.

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     Now that the Left, through its media handmaidens, has endorsed harassment, intimidation, and violence as “legitimate modes of protest,” the question has become more urgent than ever. Just about anyone known to be in the Right, or in the employ of the Trump Administration, can become a target, as the episodes involving Scott Pruitt, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Mitch McConnell should make plain. Yet it is painfully well known that to rise up on one’s hind legs and bellow back into the face of someone who behaves as Kristin Mink did generally reaps negative consequences. Even if there are no immediate repercussions, they’ll soon come along. The media make sure of it.

     What, then, must we do?

     It’s terribly unclear. No one wants to feel he’s a prisoner of his home and office. No one wants to be passive in the face of abuse. And no one wants the abuse to propagate to his loved ones, his neighbors, or his employer. But neither total passivity nor reciprocal pugnacity appear to solve the problems involved.

     In the comments to this piece, my commenters submitted a couple of suggestions: “[Tell] him that he was too stupid to argue with,” and “I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man.” While these are clever, and also confer a certain satisfaction on the user, they haven’t proved themselves in practice. I don’t expect they would, given that argument is no longer on the Left’s agenda. (It’s certainly not on the agenda of someone who harasses you at dinner in a public place.)

     Bear always in mind that the need is not to make converts, or to win an argument, or to humiliate the oppressor. It’s to be left alone in peace. And it is becoming a need ever more widely felt, including by private citizens of conservative inclinations who might choose to express them by wearing a hat.

     Thoughts, Gentle Readers?