just cosplaying

It’s fun to talk about punch­ing Nazis, but WWII wasn’t won in a fist fight.

Some­one drove their car through a crowd of counter-pro­test­ers and killed Heather Hey­er. That’s where we’re at right now.

These peo­ple are al­ready car­ry­ing guns in pub­lic. It is in no way be­yond the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ty that even­tu­al­ly they will just start straight up in­dis­crim­i­nate­ly shoot­ing peo­ple.

Some of these pa­thet­ic lit­tle shits are just cos­play­ing, and they’ve proven that with their post-ral­ly be­hav­ior. But many of them are not, and your fists ain’t gonna do shit when you’ve got the bar­rel of a gun point­ed in your face and their fin­ger on the trig­ger.

My fa­ther and great-un­cle both fought in WWII. They did­n’t punch Nazis, they killed Nazis with guns and bombs and tanks and planes. That was dur­ing wartime, and my words are ab­solute­ly NOT a call to go around killing peo­ple.

But ask your­self — how did you feel about vi­o­lence and phys­i­cal ag­gres­sion be­fore this? Do you feel dif­fer­ent­ly about it now? There’s noth­ing wrong with that, that’s okay. We’re all feel­ing a lot right now.

How do you feel about guns? Is punch­ing some­one where you draw the line? Be­cause it might not be where they draw the line. That line was al­ready crossed with a ve­hi­cle.

Life is not a pub­lic ser­vice an­nounce­ment star­ring Cap­tain Amer­i­ca and Won­der Woman where­in you punch a Nazi once and a bunch of red blood­ed Amer­i­cans cheer you on from the side­lines and the Nazi gives up and goes home and that’s that.

If you are one badass moth­er fuck­er with some se­ri­ous train­ing and skill who is ca­pa­ble of turn­ing a lit­tle Nazi shit into a grease spot and is­n’t afraid of be­ing shot and killed, and you want to put your mon­ey where your mouth is, you have all my re­spect.

But oth­ers have said this be­fore me and I’ll say it here too – if you’re not will­ing AND able to ac­tu­al­ly put your­self on the front lines and risk get­ting killed, you prob­a­bly should­n’t punch a per­son who is walk­ing around iden­ti­fy­ing as a Nazi, un­less it’s just you vs. the Nazi and you are pret­ty sure they don’t have a gun and you can ei­ther fuck them up or run re­al­ly fast.

I am none of those things so I’m not even go­ing to pre­tend. There are oth­er ways I can take a stand against this. If I in­ten­tion­al­ly put my­self in har­m’s way and risk get­ting killed, I could end up re­mov­ing my­self from the world and then I’d no longer be around to con­tribute in ways I’m ac­tu­al­ly ca­pa­ble of con­tribut­ing.

I get that maybe talk­ing loose about punch­ing Nazis is ther­a­peu­tic. This is not me try­ing to tell peo­ple to stop do­ing that be­cause I don’t want to tell peo­ple how to re­act or cope. I also rec­og­nize it’s maybe a way peo­ple are com­ing to­geth­er and try­ing to when they’d oth­er­wise drown in a sense of feel­ing lost and hope­less.

But real peo­ple’s lives are at stake here – peo­ple of col­or, peo­ple who are re­li­gious and eth­nic mi­nori­ties – so I think we need to be very care­ful about even just cre­at­ing the ap­pear­ance of treat­ing this like it’s some kind of WWII re­dux where we (white peo­ple, main­ly) are all go­ing to punch Nazis when the time comes.

No we aren’t, and our words can’t be tak­en back. If peo­ple who need us come to col­lect and we don’t have the funds we’ll just have let them down again.

I once read a sto­ry about a man in a small Slo­vak town in the present day Czech-Re­pub­lic who owned a pipe shop in town, and Ger­man of­fi­cers would buy pipes there. So, be­fore sell­ing a pipe, he would stick the pipes tip up a dog’s back­side out of view of the Ger­man of­fi­cers, then sell it to them.

I’m not say­ing do that ei­ther. (But if you hap­pen to own a smoke shop and know a Nazi…) I also know mak­ing peo­ple put items in their mouth that were pre­vi­ous­ly in a dog’s butt does­n’t save lives. (It is fun­ny though.)

Re­sis­tance comes in many forms and there are lots of ways to make a dif­fer­ence.

All I’m say­ing is, it’s easy to talk about punch­ing Nazis when you’re on the oth­er side of a screen on your couch.
 
 

—emi­ly duchaine

Flom­mist Emi­ly Duchaine lives in the Pa­cif­ic North­west. She likes to drink mead, learn about sharks, and lis­ten to the Talk­ing Heads. She pre­tends to be a pro­fes­sion­al busi­ness­woman most days. Copy­right © 2017 Emi­ly Duchaine.

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