Only safe Nazi cosplay

In these tumultuous times, I want to believe that the common person on the street is kind and worthy.

The political process dispirits me. It seems so flawed that I have a hard time believing that it is going to recover on its own. Neither party deserves loyalty from the populous, though one seems to have signed their ethics over to a false idol. My mistrust feels enough like burning it all to the ground and sifting through the ashes for anything that might have been worth rescue.

One of my stock panels is on unsolved mysteries. By their nature, they tend to involve more gruesome death than I would prefer to allow into my life. I have had to put my work to the side to let my imagining of their final hours abate. In their final, agonized minutes, there may be an answer. Better analysts than me have tried and so far failed. It is not the mystery here that intrigues me but the person or people at the heart of it. This is someone who could have influenced the world as more than a question mark. This is a full life cut short and I don't know why.

I believe in the faceted humanity of people who were long dead before someone sent me a creepy video. If I can beat my heart for the dead, how can I not move in compassion toward the living, even if their actions are despicable?

It isn't easy. Nazi party and the ethics of punching them is at the forefront of political discussion. I was fostered to equate punching Nazis as one of the greater goods. Doing so saved the world in the 1940s and remains one of the boasts about which America will not shut up. Nazis are stock villains in media, beings with almost no redeeming features. They rank below zombies in "things you are encouraged to shoot in the head with your BFG."

I do not have sympathy for Nazis. I detest everything they stand for. Being a Nazi is itself an act of violence. I cannot condone treating "I want to murder you and everyone like you" with mollycoddling. If you want to act like a Nazi, society ought to treat you like the genocidal, superstitious, scientifically illiterate, easily led sycophant you are. Yet, my day job is trying to educate teenage boys who have served as headlines: rapists, murderers, violent criminals. I have looked the Devil in his eyes and told him I wanted a five-paragraph essay on Emily Dickinson by the end of the period. (To be clear, my students are not the Devil, but the Devil can buy a timeshare behind their eyes.) I want to believe that these white supremacists - or the "alt-right," though I don't think a rebranding fools anyone worth knowing - are as broken, are lashing out against a system they feel has failed them. (Being a white man in America is the height of inconvenience). I get disenfranchisement, having heard it snarled from a hundred gang members. It is different working in compassion when they are not marching down the street with tiki torches, screaming "Jews will not replace us," and influencing the White House. My little MS-13 brats are not politically savvy. Our president isn't calling them "good people" or installing people into his cabinet that put out dog whistles in favor of the Latin Kings.

It is easier to say what you would do when it is all hypothetical, when the monsters are not being interviewed on the evening news and complimented on how dapper they are. The Bloods and Crips are not in my town, so that problem feels more remote and am able to lecture on it. If these gangs treated the drugstore down the road as a marker in their turf war, if blood was shed in front of the hippie cafe, I could not divorce myself long enough to help a twelve-year-old gang patsy to the light.

A few days ago, a few middle school boys stood beside their bikes at the end of my road, in the same uniform (khaki cargo shorts, dark blue polo shirts, MAGA hats) sieg heiling passing cars until I pulled up next to them and glared for want of something to say to the Hitlerjugend. Junior Nazis are manifesting in my pastoral college town, populated by a rainbow of people their hero Adolph systematically murdered. They feel that they will get away with this. They are likely right. They are the children, in spirit if not in fact, of the couple of truckers in town who fly enormous Confederate flags behind their trucks, honking at people as a threat or to attract attention to their racism. Devils are pounding at the Gates, and they look a lot like kids I want to teach about The Outsiders and Ender's Game. If the kids took off their uniforms and put on a guileless smile, you wouldn't know that they had been encouraging hate crimes minutes before.

But they are still children. They can get over this rampant stupidity, and I hope they will before they are culpable for worse crimes. I am not frightened of them as individuals. They are not intimidating, especially as I could disperse them with a glare. Yet, until they grow out of this, they are allying themselves with genocide. This isn't rebelling by piercing your ear with a safety pin or sagging your pants to your knees. This is threatening people with the greatest atrocities on the twentieth century, the survivors of which are still alive. The difference between a Nazi and someone playacting being a Nazi is paper thin and fleeting. They need to feel compassion now before they get swastika tattoos and are harder to redeem. They need to be stopped now by parents before they are stopped by the unsympathetic (we hope) police.

Soon in Xenology: Sanity. Writing. Summer.

last watched: Black Mirror
reading: What the Hell Did I Just Read?
listening: Damien Rice