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Information technology'due south not the steamy atmospheric condition that alarms me, although I'm increasingly inclined to wait until sunset for my daily walks. It'southward not even the rapidly melting glaciers, the plight of African elephants or the prospect of a costly sewer line repair outside our firm, although all those things are alarming, also.

No, what really alarms me this summer is that our earth is starting to resemble i of those dystopian tales on the guild of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 or Soylent Green. Virtually every day at present, the news drops some fresh horror onto our dilapidated heads — and we're not fifty-fifty engaged in a major state of war. Nosotros're simply looking at everyday life during the past calendar month of a bad year in a mostly-disastrous century.

• As a relatively balmy preface to this month's horror show, the United Kingdom voted (narrowly) to exit the European Matrimony. The "Brexit" caused panic and discord in Europe, a temporary stock marketplace swoon, and disgruntled rumblings among the liberal-leaning elite that such vital matters shouldn't be entrusted to ignorant voters. (In other words, democracy has its limits!)
• On Bastille Day, a radicalized Tunisian-built-in French Muslim drove a truck more than a mile through a oversupply that had gathered to enjoy the fireworks forth a waterfront promenade in Dainty. The 31-year-one-time terrorist managed to obliterate 84 innocent humans (including at least ten children) and injure scores more than before he was mercifully euthanized by the law.
• A 17-year-old Afghan refugee armed with an axe and a knife terrorized a train near Wurzburg, Germany, slashing at least v passengers before police took him down. The teen had pledged to kill infidels and was heard to exclaim "Allahu Akbar!" earlier entering that peculiar paradise reserved for dead Islamic terrorists.
• In Turkey, an attempted military coup ended in disaster equally President-and-Aspiring-Dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed the defection with a lilliputian help from his police. Nigh 300 died during the upheaval, and angry mobs demanded the death penalty for some six thou rebels. A vast purge is now underway: Erdogan has fired 45,000 military and public officials forth with xv,000 educators (including all academy deans). Their professional futures don't look especially bright at the moment. Meanwhile, Erdogan blamed a 77-year-one-time Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania's Poconos for instigating the insurrection and demanded his extradition. (As Dave Barry used to write, I AM Non MAKING THIS Upward.)
• The much-anticipated Rio Summertime Olympics could sputter out in a miasma of polluted h2o, Zika infections, rampant crime, decimated attendance, political instability and the possible expulsion of the entire Russian team due to functioning-enhancing drugs. What if they threw an Olympics and nobody came?
• Puffy North Korean chieftain Kim Jung Un launched 3 ballistic missiles into the sea as a test designed to simulate a pre-emptive nuclear attack on South Korean ports and airfields. As South korea'due south primary ally, the U.South. is committed to respond if the North e'er attacks the S. Calling Dr. Strangelove.

Of course, the United States hasn't been immune to the July madness.Two more than black men — Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota — were executed past police force during what should have been routine stops. Information technology's almost ever the same story: nervous confrontations, misunderstandings, threats, hair-trigger reactions, sudden expiry, grief and anger. Those two men should withal exist live, just in that location's no going back.

Considering the victims were blackness men shot by law, their tragedies fabricated national headlines. (We almost never hear about the white men fatally shot by police, fifty-fifty though — surprise! — they outnumber black victims by a ratio of roughly two-to-1. Are white shooting victims less newsworthy? Would they muddy the narrative? Maybe they'd help focus the narrative more than on overuse of lethal force and less on race.)

The Black Lives Affair people staged reasonably peaceful protests in response to the ii executions, and they were entitled to practise then. Fifty-fifty though their fears and resentments are based on a distorted narrative fed to them past the media, those fears and resentments are genuinely felt. They wonder why their people seem to be disproportionately targeted past the government, and naturally they worry that any run into with the local constabulary could chop-chop turn fatal.

Then the unthinkable happened: five cops assassinated by a militant black sniper in Dallas, and some other three methodically gunned down in Billy Rouge, scene of Alton Sterling'due south death. The latter assassinator, as well a blackness militant, traveled well-nigh 800 miles from Kansas Metropolis to carry out his revenge.

The two black assassins saw their victims equally symbols rather than individuals with distinct personalities, families, hobbies and personal histories. The cops became interchangeable representatives of a hated group. The Baton Rouge shooter might have been unaware that i of the assassinated officers, Montrell Jackson, was a black man love for his kindness and decency and, ultimately, for a heartbreakingly sympathetic Facebook message that stands equally a attestation to his graphic symbol. In the end, all that mattered to his murderer was that he wore blue.

That's what terrorists do: they reduce three-dimensional humans to apartment cartoon figures who conveniently represent The Enemy. Shorn of individual traits, virtues and quirks, they're easier to view as targets.

Extremist ideologues do the same thing, without going every bit far equally to commit literal murder. Their ideological opponents become caricatures, fatigued broadly and grotesquely for the purpose of ridicule and political annihilation. Reduced to easy targets, they never gain consideration as private human beings. They're identical ducks in a shooting gallery. Progressives encounter conservatives every bit dangerously ignorant xenophobic yahoos with a gun fetish; conservatives view liberals as effete anti-Christian snobs who shield Islamists and abet all mode of gender-bending depravity. As for whites and blacks, those labels alone imply that they're opposites predestined to eternal conflict.

The Us is increasingly vulnerable to random acts of terrorism.Just equally disturbingly, our commonwealth has go fertile ground for the kind of intellectual terrorism that reduces boyfriend citizens to two-dimensional targets. On the left, "white male" is now a virtual epithet accompanied by vocabulary garnered from collegiate Grievance Studies seminars: patriarchy, hegemony, structural racism and the similar. On the right, all forms of "otherness" are more often than not doubtable.

Am I caricaturing the caricaturists? Perhaps. But I demand to betoken out that such divisive attitudes are unsafe. They might not propel u.s. toward a literal civil war (although I wouldn't rule it out), but they've already launched a rhetorical one.

Extremist rhetoric is magnetic: it tends to pull unaffiliated souls toward the poles and away from the middle. The ranks of moderates are dwindling while the extremists are gaining ground at our expense. The result: more anger, less tolerance, and the kind of July madness that nosotros've been witnessing.

Our overheated July is coming to a head with the two national conventions. Equally I write this, the Republicans are going at it in Cleveland. No orgies of madness to report so far, other than the ominous cries of "Lock her up!" whenever a speaker utters Hillary Clinton's name. The gun rhetoric has been less militant than I expected, even from the Duck Dynasty scion who spoke the first nighttime and the NRA spokesman who followed him. Melania Trump's surprisingly constructive speech was immediately undermined by revelations of plagiarism — most likely not her fault, although extracting a confession from the Trump organization was like pulling half a dozen teeth. I've smiled quizzically at the D-list show biz celebrities chosen upon to address the assembled crowd. (Yeah, it must be tough to come out every bit Republican in Hollywood.) I wondered why that crowd was booing the speech by Senator Ted Cruz, until I realized that he had no intention of endorsing Trump for the presidency. Trump's grown children seem like models of filial loyalty, groomed attractiveness and good citizenship — inappreciably the spawn of Satan. (The man himself speaks this night.)

On the whole, the Republican convention hasn't looked much like the apocalypse. I suspect that the upcoming Democratic convention hither in Philadelphia will follow suit. But the ground continues to rumble and simmer beneath the surface — here in the U.Due south. and effectually the world. The pressure builds, and the summer is just half over.

Rick Bayan is founder-editor of The New Moderate.

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Source: https://newmoderate.com/2016/07/21/july-2016-its-not-the-apocalypse-but-its-close-enough/

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