No Justice, no peace

Please allow me to indulge in an almost pointlessly long hypothetical rhetorical experiment.

Cool, thanks.

You turn on the news (ha ha, how quaint!)... okay, you click on done link at whatever the cool kids read on the internet, and you see that Neil Degrasse Tyson has been invited to speak at OBU... only the student body is so enraged that they are setting things on fire, smashing car windows, and blocking access to the admin buildings on campus.

What do you feel?

Is there any excuse for this?

But Chuck, you made a bad analogy! NDT is awesome and nobody could possibly disagree with him! These other folks are EXTREMISTS! They are fomenting HATE!

Uh-huh.

So what if it were Richard Dawkins? Spike Lee? Robert Mapplethorpe? Does it matter? Have we really reached the point where we tolerate setting things on fire better than ideas we disagree about?

I'd like to see a much more robust response to these thugs. Yes, not protesters, but thugs. Protesters do not break things. Thugs do. I'm puzzled why it is that there is any sympathy for them. This is not how to be an adult, this is not how to be a citizen of a free republic... our really anything else save a banana republic.
These thugs need to be arrested and charged with the crimes that they are committing. To let them go is to abridge justice...

Someone once said that a nation gets the the criminals that its justice system deserves. What do we deserve? Lawlessness and riots? At this rate, yes. If we do not bring the thugs to justice, there will be no peace.
Time will tell.