See you in the club-and-cudgel aisle

A few days after a riotous mob was stirred to violent, deadly insurrection by Trump’s lies about a stolen election — with absolutely no evidence in support except his deceptive words — I found myself walking past the sporting goods department in Walmart. The shelves behind the counter were bare.

“I didn’t know you sold toilet paper in sporting goods,” I joked to the cashier.

“We don’t,” she said. “That’s the ammunition shelves.”

“Oh,” I said, “has Walmart stopped selling guns and ammunition?” Foolish question.

She shook her head. “Sold out,” she said. “All gone since Wednesday.” The day of the insurrection. “Not just here, but in every Walmart all across the country.”

She said it in a sorry way — not like “I’m sorry I can’t help you build up your arsenal,” but “I’m sorry we have come to this as a culture.” The kind of sorry that let you know that she was a sensitive, thinking human being.

“We still have plenty of knives, though,” she said, in an ironic tone and with a slow shake of her head that matched her “what have we come to?” stance.

“Where do you keep your clubs and cudgels?” I asked. “Probably be a run on those next week.”

It would be logical to ask: “How did we get here?” except that we all know how we got here, don’t we? And we didn’t get here in a single jolt after a political rally on a Wednesday in January. We’ve been creeping toward here for years.

Five or six years ago, I met a man who owned military-style weaponry, and when I asked him why, his answer was chilling.

It’s not to protect him from robbers or rapists, he said. It’s certainly not for hunting. And although he said he enjoys target-shooting, he only did that as a means to a more serious end.

“What if our own government went bad?” he said. “How you gonna stop that without guns as good as theirs?”

“A Russian invasion, you mean?”

A shake of the head. “No, we got an army to stop that. I mean our own government.”

I asked him what our government would have to do for him to put them in his sights. No specific answers came forth, except something like: “We’ll know it when we see it.”

I pressed on, trying to understand his reasoning. “But even if you knew it when you saw it, what would that look like?” I asked. “I mean, what exact ‘government’ target would be in your sights? Because, after all, the agents who protect and defend our government are cops, and soldiers, and national guardsmen, right? Are you saying you’re preparing for the day when you’ll take aim at a uniformed cop or a soldier doing his job to defend our government if you don’t like what that government is doing?”

He shrugged and repeated his generalized, vague “government gone bad” line, which he would know when he saw it.

Well, now we have seen what a guy like him thinks it looks like, haven’t we? All it took was for a megalomaniacal demagogue to whine without evidence that he was cheated out of another four years (or more, if he had his way about it). All it took was for a desperate despot to urge that the day that “you’d know when you see it” had arrived. All it took was for him to ball up his hands into tiny fists and say “Fight, fight, fight,” for easily – duped, cultish, conspiracy-minded “patriots” to take arms against our government.

In the words of senate GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the mob “was fed lies” and “provoked by the president” to insurrection.

I thought of that man I spoke to five or six years ago when I saw the mob of insurrectionists storm the Capitol building, leaving five dead, including Brian D. Sicknick, the Capitol police officer murdered by a rioter who clubbed him with a fire extinguisher. Sicknick was doing his duty, protecting and defending our government, when a delusional rioter who “knew bad government when he saw it” decided that a cop should die.

I thought of that man when I saw those empty ammo shelves a few days after Officer Sicknick died. I wish I could meet him again and see what he had to say about the riot. I wonder if he may have been there. Anyway, there’s little chance I’ll run into him at Walmart anytime soon, because Walmart has nothing left on the shelves to draw him in.

But maybe, once all the knives are also sold out, I’ll see you in the club-and-cudgel aisle. Because if we do nothing more than shrug and pardon the insurrection and everyone involved with it, if we don’t shudder at the sight of empty ammo shelves at Walmarts across the land, we’ll get there soon enough.

Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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