You Have The Right To Speak & I Have An Equal Right Not To Have To Listen To You
People who shut down cities to promote their agenda are terrorists
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
SAN FRANCISCO & PENINSULA NEWS — Gaza protest shuts down Golden Gate Bridge for hours, causing gridlock on both sides of span — CBS News
Your Freedom Is Limited By My Rights
Every freedom you have is limited by a right that I have, and every freedom I have is limited by a right that you have.
- Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my noise.
- You have a right to speak, and I have a right not to have to listen to you.
- You have a right to call people, but I have a right to make you stop calling me.
- You have the right to peacefully protest, and I have the right to live my life substantially unharmed by your protest.
No Society Can Survive The Chaos Of Constant Infrastructure Attacks
No country, no economy, no society can function if everyone with an opinion is free to pursue their cause through violence, intimidation, infrastructure interference or social disruption.
If everybody gets to impose their opinions on everybody else with guns, civil disturbances, vandalism, riots, bombings, and infrastructure attacks or the like then you can’t have a functioning country and nobody is free.
If You Get To Shut Down The City Then So Do Your Enemies & That = Chaos
If that’s how things are going to work, then every infrastructure attack you make to pursue your agenda can be countered by an infrastructure attack your enemies launch to advance their agenda, and everyone lives in the middle of a social war — chaos.
- Day one, pro-abortion people hack the subway system computers and gridlock the city to protest laws against abortion.
- Day two, anti-abortion people hack the bank clearing-house computers to gridlock the financial system to protest laws allowing abortion.
- Day three, Pro-Israel people jam all the bridges to protest attacks on Israel.
- Day four, Pro-Palestine people disable semi-trucks on the airport’s runways to protest the government’s aid to Israel.
- Day five, homeless advocates . . . .
The Righteousness Of The Goal You’re Pursuing Doesn’t Matter
It doesn’t matter how righteous you think your cause is.
It’s doesn’t matter if you’re sure that what you want is part of God’s plan or is extremely moral or is important or is totally, totally righteous.
The correctness, the value, the goodness of your goals doesn’t matter.
Other People Have The Right To Hold A Different Opinion From Yours Without You Materially Interfering In Their Lives
We all have the right not to care what you think or what you want. We all have the right to peacefully live our lives without being harmed or materially inconvenienced by your pursuit of your causes.
What you believe, the goals you want to achieve, are not and should not be our problem.
It doesn’t matter if you’re protesting human sex trafficking, promoting increased funding for cancer research, trying to save the rain forest or fighting global warming because
- (1) you don’t get to decide what’s right for us, what we should care about, at the point of a gun, and
- (2) no society can survive a constant state of any and every interest group attacking the common infrastructure in order to coerce the citizens or the government to run things their way.
The Fundamental Principle Of Terrorism
The fundamental principle of terrorism is: “It is acceptable to try to coerce the government to implement your social or political agenda by imposing fear, pain or suffering on the general population.”
Terrorists believe that harming others is OK so long as the result they’re pursuing is righteous.
Simplified: Terrorists believe that their ends justify any means.
Terrorists believe that blowing up a building or releasing sarin gas in a subway is OK if the goal is good, for example, increasing funding for cancer research or stemming the destruction of the Amazon rain forest.
- It’s OK to shoot the employees of a bank to get them to open the vault if you’re going to use the money to fund the overthrow of an evil tyrant.
- Because you think abortion is murder, you think it’s OK to blow up hospitals that perform abortions.
- It’s OK to blow up a bus full of children in order to coerce the government to do something you want it to do or to stop doing something you don’t want it to do.
People Who Think They’re Entitled To Harm Others To Achieve A Social Goal Are Terrorists
People who think it’s OK to harm innocent people in order to gain a result they can’t achieve through democratic means, who think they’re entitled to inflict substantial fear, pain or loss on innocent people in order to coerce their government to do what they want, are terrorists.
People Who Attack The Infrastructure To Achieve Their Political Goals Are Terrorists
People use the roads and bridges to get to work to earn money to feed their families; to get to medical appointments, including surgeries; to get to airports for business trips or family vacations that they have saved for and planned for months; to transport vital equipment, parts, even human organs for transplant.
When you close down freeways and bridges for hours you do huge, massive harm to tens of thousands of innocent people.
- When you block the Golden Gate Bridge to protest Israel’s treatment of Gaza, you’re a terrorist.
- When you block the 880 freeway to protest Israel’s treatment of Gaza, you’re a terrorist.
- If you block the Golden Gate Bridge to protest Hamas’ attack on Israel, you’re a terrorist.
- If you block the 880 freeway to protest Hamas’ attack on Israel, you’re a terrorist.
You Can’t Achieve The Right Result By Doing The Wrong Thing.
This “ends justifies the means” terrorist principle is not a new idea.
This same “the ends justify the means” bullshit was used by the IRA, ISIS, Baader–Meinhof, Al Qaeda — the list goes on and on — to shoot, maim and murder countless people in the pursuit of their self-defined righteous goals.
Here’s an inconvenient fact for you: If your group is not getting what it wants through democratic means — tough shit!
You can’t win enough elections to get what you want? Too bad. Suck it up unless and until you can win enough elections to get the government to act the way you think it should.
What you want doesn’t matter unless and until you can get enough people to agree with you so that you can democratically enact the change you want.
As much as you have a right to freedom of speech, you don’t have the right to attack the infrastructure, to massively inconvenience tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people, as a mechanism to force others to listen to what you have to say or coerce them to do what you want them to do.
Terrorist Acts Deserve Terrorist Punishment
No matter how righteous they think their goals are, people who attack vital public systems in the pursuit of ANY cause (including causes I emphatically agree with) are terrorists and they should be federally prosecuted and federally imprisoned.
You are not entitled to pursue the right goal by doing the wrong thing.
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
