For What It's Worth, Redux

I think most if not all of us remember this song, i.e. For What It's Worth, by Buffalo Springfield.  Perhaps most, but certainly not all of us remember the year it came out as well--1967.  Also the year Sergeant Pepper came out.  The year of the summer of love.

The lyrics to this song seem applicable now, 53 years later.  There is a man with a gun "over there" and he's telling us we "got to beware."  But the man with a gun is a protestor now, telling those of us who're not protesting to beware.  It's a reversal of roles.  The protests of the 1960s were violent, sometimes.  But generally those protesting didn't do so while armed.  

The "far right" protester of today seems to want to protest with a firearm handy.   Or to have one handy while witnessing protests by others they think inappropriate.  We're told they do so to protect property and, presumably, the owners of property, which protection is unsolicited.  I'm a gun owner, but I confess I can't fathom why people think it appropriate to carry them around, particularly in a manner and at a time and place where they're certain to be noticed doing so.  Why are they marching with guns?  It seems not merely to show support for the Second Amendment by parading about clutching the arms they have the right to bear.  After all, it isn't merely the Second Amendment that prompts them to protest.  It's a number of other things, apparently.  Anything from an alleged conspiracy to commit election fraud or engage in child trafficking.  Why the guns, though?

Many have what seems to be a totemic regard for firearms here in our Glorious Union, and perhaps they feel that they should therefore be brandished, like the image of a saint in a parade on a holy day.  Or perhaps they're symbols of power, like the Arch of the Covenant carried into battle.  Perhaps they wish to intimidate those who watch them posture; perhaps they fear they won't be respected or even harmed, and so bring guns for protection against threats real or imagined.  Or perhaps they're a symbol of pride of sorts.  Pride in owning, or at least having, a gun?  That's not much of an achievement here.  Pride, then, in having something they may think is peculiarly American?  It may be so.

It seems clear that the right to have a gun isn't something that's generally considered to be a human right, or at least not such a right as to be memorialized in a nation's constitution, one of its founding documents.  So perhaps the gun is truly the symbol of the United States.  What, then, is the National Gun, though?  We have national birds, flags, animals, flowers; why not a national gun.  Something manufactured by Colt, Winchester or Remington, I assume.

"Paranoia strikes deep" is in the lyrics of the song.  Paranoia can readily be attributed to those who believe in massive election fraud regardless of evidence, the "deep state" and global, organized pedophilia. It's interesting to consider what paranoia was being referred to in the song, in 1967.  The paranoia of the protesters most probably wasn't.  Buffalo Springfield was made up of souls like Neil Young, whose sympathies would have been with the protesters of the 1960s.  Paranoia of the anti-protestors back then?  What did they have to be paranoid about, though?  Students and blacks taking over the government?  Anarchy?  Communism?

"Step out of line, the man (men?) come and take you away."  Who's stepping out of line, now?  "The line" is usually a standard or condition imposed by "the man", which is to say the government, those in control.  But where those who pose the threat claim to be protecting the "rightful" government, what line do we step out of?  

The protestors of the 1960s didn't purport to represent the government or "the man."  Arguably, they didn't even claim to represent "the people."  The armed protestors of today claim to represent the people, the nation, the true government.  The pretense is astounding, when you think of it. 

Is that pretense also peculiarly American?  The Founders took pains to justify their revolution, claiming that unjust laws warranted it.  The Founders weren't the poor, the downtrodden; they weren't slaves.  They were land owners, slave owners, lawyers, merchants, rich farmers.  It was a revolution of the well-off.  Is what we're seeing now a reaction by the well-off, the white and privileged, concerned that they may lose their place, through another kind of government action?