Unpopular opinion: it does not take a feat of empathy to oppose political violence.
Let me be blunt: I don’t feel sorry for billionaires, lobbyists, or political operatives who work to erase us. I oppose political violence not because I pity them, but because I refuse to sacrifice my family and friends on the altar of a fantasy victory. Violence is indiscriminate; it will take lives we cannot afford to lose.
I don’t want to see my friends die in 4k while the rest of the world makes jokes. I don’t want to watch people I love become content on somebody’s feed. I don’t want to see the taboo against violence, the one thing that holds this fragile democracy together, dissolve into irony.
The temptation to let go of that taboo is real. Hatred is easy to carry, and for the oppressed it sometimes feels like armor. But the truth is that if you don’t learn to love your oppressor, you risk becoming them. Not love in the sense of forgiveness, not reconciliation or surrender, but love as refusal. Refusal to let hatred shape you into their mirror. Refusal to let anger define the outlines of your future.
History is ruthless on this point. The French Revolution replaced monarchy with terror. Even in our own movements, the line between resistance and cruelty can blur until no one is safe. Violence does not break the cycle; it feeds it. If we cannot release the grip of hatred, we end up replicating the very cruelty we swore to destroy.
That’s why democracy, even when it hurts, is better than war. Elections can wound you. They can take away rights, strip away dignity, set you back years in the fight for justice. But they do not annihilate everything.
A democratic outcome that harms you and your community is still better than a war that destroys it all. Ballots preserve the possibility of repair. Bullets do not.
Think about all of your friends and family members. Which of them would you be willing to sacrifice for a chance at an outcome that feels out of reach through our system of government? Any of them?
Now remind yourself: you don’t get to choose who is lost once the cycle of vengeance begins. Nor is violence limited to those who step into the fight. Studies of civil conflict show that noncombatants often suffer higher casualty rates than the people carrying the guns.
The people who built the systems we live in knew this. However flawed they were, they had seen what war did. They buried friends, watched cities burn, lived with scars that never healed. They built rules not out of saintliness but out of memory. Restraint was not weakness, it was wisdom: the hard lesson that peace, however imperfect, is worth more than victory soaked in blood.
And that’s the piece I think we miss in our own moment. Rejecting political violence isn’t about empathy for our enemies. It’s about survival for us. It’s about protecting our communities from becoming content in the endless churn of cruelty. It’s about refusing to play out the cycle one more time.
Last week, there was yet another mass shooting in America. A man drove his pickup truck into a Mormon church, setting the building ablaze and opening fire. He was killed, along with several members of the congregation.
What happened afterward moved me to tears: they’ve raised nearly $100,000 for the widow and child of the shooter. And consider who we’re talking about here.
This is a community that has known repression and intolerance. Mormon history is scarred by violence: their founder Joseph Smith was assassinated, their people were driven from state to state, and in 1838 Missouri’s governor issued an order calling for their “extermination.” In the mid-19th century they fought an armed conflict against the United States government itself.
If anyone could be expected to respond to violence with vengeance, it would be them.
But that’s not what happened. In a moment when retaliation would have been the most natural response, they chose something else. Not because it was easy, but because it was the only way forward that didn’t condemn them to repeat the violence forever.
I know it’s unpopular. Rage feels righteous, and it’s intoxicating to imagine the scales balanced in blood. But liberation is not just freedom from power—it’s freedom from the need to dominate others.
If we can’t find a way to hold onto that, then the story isn’t finished. We’re still bound to our oppressors, still defined by their gravity, still trapped in their cycle.
The taboo against political violence is the thin thread that keeps us from falling into the abyss. If we lose it, we don’t just lose the fight—we lose the future. And there won’t be anyone left to laugh about it.
Thank you for posting this.