In praise of the what if, whatever, and why not of doubt

I’ll just bet you haven’t heard the term, “fatal funnel.”  Can you imagine what it might be?  I mean, try to form an image in your mind of a funnel, any kind of funnel, like the one you might have used to pour oil into your car’s engine, or even a waffle ice cream cone with the small end removed.  Now try to figure out how you would make a thing called a “funnel” deadly.

I’ll bet you can’t.  But I want you to know, there are a lot of people who can.  Some of them bought militia manuals and bomb-making videos that a man by the name of Christopher Arthur published online through a company he called Tackleberry Solutions.  One of the manuals was called, “The End of America or the Next Revolutionary War.”  According to an ABC News story published today, Christopher Arthur believed that, “the U.S. was falling into chaos and there would be only one way to survive: kill or be killed.” 

Arthur is an Army combat veteran of the war in Iraq and a member of the National Guard.  He was found guilty of teaching people to make improvised explosive devices intended to kill police officers and for possessing bombs and bomb-making materials inside and around his home in Mount Olive, North Carolina.  His wife and five children lived in the home where he stored the bombs.  One bomb was on his porch under an overturned plastic tub where his children played.  It was wired to a trigger that would set it off if police ever approached his house to arrest him.  A judge gave Arthur 20 years in prison, the maximum allowed by law.

A fatal funnel is a tactic taught by Arthur to prospective militia members who visited his North Carolina farm for training sessions.  The tactic is intended to trap attackers by funneling them into a smaller and smaller space until they can be shot and killed by a small untit or single shooter.  Joshua Blessed stayed at Arthur’s farm and slept on a cot in his kitchen.  During the day, Arthur and Blessed would go out into the surrounding woods to shoot automatic weapons and practice bomb making and military tactics. 

Blessed was a truck driver.  According to ABC News, weeks after training with Arthur in North Carolina, Blessed was stopped for speeding in his truck on a road between Rochester and Buffalo in upstate New York.  An argument with the police officer ensued, and Blessed drove off with the officer still standing on his truck’s running board.  During the chase that followed, Blessed fired at pursuing police cars until he finally turned his truck to block a narrow highway off-ramp with the truck’s trailer and cab in a V-shape.  Blessed fired from the cab at officers until one of the officers managed to get around to the other side of the truck.  Surprised, Blessed drove off, followed by the police cars.  Finally, they forced his truck onto a farm road where they had set up a police ambush and fired at the truck cab as he sped by.  The truck crashed into a ditch, and officers found Blessed dead in the driver’s seat with a bullet through his head.  Five police vehicles had been struck by bullets fired by Blessed. Forty police officers in all were involved in the chase. 

Blessed had been trying to form a militia group called “The Army of God” to prepare for an “upcoming Civil War,” according to the FBI’s field office in Richmond, Virginia.  ABC reported that officers found in Blessed’s truck after the chase “two how-to explosives and military tactics manuals for which he had paid $850 from Arthur’s Tackleberry Solutions. They would find $125,000 in cash, 14 live pipe bombs, an AK-47 with a scope, a .50-caliber rifle, a sniper rifle and tens of thousands of dollars in ammunition.”

The FBI finally arrested Christopher Arthur after an undercover officer witnessed and secretly recorded Arthur teaching others, including the undercover officer, to make improvised explosive devices.  Arthur described to the undercover officer how he would kill the governor of a state: “Say it’s a whole walled-off gated house. The governor’s mansion. Alright, how do I attack him? Well, he’s going to have to leave to go to the Capitol at some point, right?  I know if I can put a round right there in the base of the windshield where it meets the dashboard. I’ll hit him. So is the sniper hit better? Yes.”  According to the undercover FBI man, Arthur’s wife and children were nearby in the yard working in a garden and talking about school when the assassination instruction took place.

Twenty years in prison.  A heavily armed truck driver killed after a chase by 40 cops on a public highway.  Hundreds convicted of criminal trespass and violence against police officers at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, people Donald Trump among whom included himself at a town hall yesterday on the Univision Network when he used the word, “we.”

“We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns,” Trump said. “That was a day of love.”

Please allow me to tell you what the difference is between politics and a gun.  With a slight depression of your finger on a trigger, a gun can kill, meaning a gun can end the life of another human being.  Politics can affect you.  Politics can change what you pay in taxes, or what speed you are allowed to drive on your local streets or an interstate highway, or whether your trash is picked up once or twice a week.  Politics can be confusing and infuriating.  Policy arguments and political contests can be won or lost, but the results are not forever.

When politics and guns merge, civil war is the result.  Six hundred thousand Americans died between 1861 and 1865 because of a political argument over the issue of slavery.  The difference between the South and the North was that the South was willing to kill and be killed in order to maintain the right to own other human beings as slaves.  The political argument ended when the first shot was fired. 

Wars are absolute.  Winning and losing means life or death.  But politics in this country is not a fatal funnel, narrowing it down to “us” and “them,” making it as absolute as warfare. 

They used to call politics the battlefield of ideas.  One of our two political parties has decided that its politics is existential, that it is a battlefield where being “right” conveys absolute power given by God.  Winning in this kind of politics means the rule of law can be superseded by force, allowing the National Guard and active duty Army to be employed against those who were “wrong.”  One of our two political candidates has recently threatened to do just this if he is elected.  Such a right to retribution comes only from belief in self, not in laws that are agreed upon as greater than oneself.

Our other political party has more doubts than beliefs.  Doubt allows for the possibility of loss in the way that science assures us of the inevitability of our own deaths.  We know the sun will come up in the morning because we have experience in day and night that dates back to the opening of our eyes as infants.  We have no such experience with certainty.  It is a belief system, an illusion invented in hopes of personal gain. 

How does “whatever” win out over “must be”?  By realizing that right and wrong are temporal, part of the natural ebb and flow of living on this planet, as floods and fires and earthquakes are as much a part of the weather of existence as the birth of a child or the death of a loved one.

We are here.  One day, we won’t be, and there will be others who come after us.  Then politics will belong to them.  That is the difference between belief, which seeks to fix a certain future, and doubt, which allows for the inevitability of change.