I was listening to a cover of Robert Earl Keen's "Shades of Gray" (see below) earlier today and it gave me the idea for this post. Near the end of the song it makes a reference to "that morning in late April, Oklahoma '95 " which took me a while to connect with the rest of the song. On April 19, 1995 Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder truck full of fertilizer, racing fuel, and stolen explosives outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, lit the fuse and walked away.
McVeigh was angry with the federal government over the events at Waco and Ruby Ridge and feared it was coming for peoples' guns. Fast forward twenty five years and you have the ideological descendants of McVeigh and his compatriots marching into downtown Louisville armed to the teeth. All of these photos are from September 5th of this year, when the Three Percenters militia types showed up at Jefferson Square Park on the covid delayed Kentucky Derby day.
Shades of gray was the order of the day that Saturday afternoon. It was so surreal, law enforcement stayed hid while several hundred heavily armed people who didn't see eye to eye got in each other's faces. There was shouting aplenty, and a bit of shoving and jostling but luckily it never progressed further than that.
As tense and emotionally fraught as the situation was, one bad decision or wrong move would have been all it took to set off a general firefight. I can tell you, it does interesting things to the mental calculus you do in regards to people's actions and your responses. Do you retaliate? Should you escalate? Under what conditions are you willing to open fire? What do you ignore or let slide?
I'm reminded of an old saying, "Needs must when the devil drives." You can have all the laws, rules, and regulations you want but when left to fend for themselves people will do as they think best. (There's a similar issue with giving 18 year olds rifles and sending them off to fight wars in foreign lands, ultimately they're the ones interpreting/implementing policy) I think even the city was seeing things that way, technically it is illegal for militia to parade with arms (open carry is legal though, how's that for some gray?) but the city decided that was one battle they didn't want to fight and declined to enforce that law.
For all the potential for things to go badly that day, in some ways I find the encounter reassuring. I don't know if it was the shared experience of carrying arms or simply the fact that everyone had a gun but the two sides were able to establish some semblance of respect for one another during the encounter. They will probably never like one another but they were able to work with one another to deescalate the tense moments and ultimately disengage (only after that did the cops show up). I suspect that managing to agree on a shade of gray beats the alternative by a wide margin.
Who was on the other side? The left seems to be outgunned.
They were, there was about 75-100 protesters and 250-300 III%ers. NFAC was in town that day as well but them and the III%ers ignored or avoided each other.