Threats Are Not Idle

 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it with these stories about public servants getting death threats from people upset with their policies, actions, or perceived inaction. It’s one thing for some folks to get angry, but when they pick up the phone or hit their keyboards to threaten election officials or even school board members with firing squads, haven’t they crossed a line from free speech into felonious behavior?

The thing that makes me angry is that most of these offenders don’t have the slightest intention of carrying out their threats. They don’t have to invade the Capitol. All they need are words, but they aim them with enough accuracy to strike real fear into their targets, some of whom feel they have to go into hiding. Some threateners say things like, “I know where you live, and I know the names of your children.”

According to an investigative story by Reuters, law enforcement, especially at the local level, isn’t doing very much about this. One police agency said it was impossible to trace an anonymous call, but reporters tracked down that caller and others with ease. Even more surprising, some of the people they found were actually proud of what they had done.

Cable and broadcast news play back some of these messages, so laced with bleeps to cover the obscenities that they’re almost unintelligible. Still, words like “traitor” do get through.

Some may blame the former President for opening the door to this, but I’d like to see more of an effort to blame the actual threateners. My own fear is that if nothing is done, we will start accepting these things as normal modern background noise.

There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear, as the song lyrics go. But what seems clear to me is that there has been a dramatic rise in apocalyptic thinking. Civil war isn’t enough for some folks, they believe that they are soldiers in the battle against Satanic forces and that the streets will have to run red with blood – preferably, not their own, of course.

Hey, I like good horror movies and those cautionary tales about the future that awaits too, but I don’t live in them. Real life is already offering us apocalypses: a pandemic, climate change, and a collapsing supply chain, just to name a few. We should have plenty to occupy us all, even the drama-deprived. There is no need to make stuff up.

But it would please me greatly to see some high-profile prosecutions of those who make these off-the-scale threats, wherever they fall in the political spectrum. Words can be weapons too.

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