“Don’t Make Me Come Over There!”
What does it mean when those words, ‘Don’t make me come over there’ ring in your memory, in a harsh tone of voice? For some folks, it paralyzes the hearer in place and the hair stands up on the back of the neck. Fear may accompany that voice and the six words that are impossible to ignore. On another plane, the tone of voice that accompanies the words may strongly influence one’s behavior, and “danger, danger” flashes on the mind and encourages a swift exit. On a personal level, it is quite easy in a nanosecond to create the accurate response and action. But on a larger plane of thinking, a national or generational cultural society of a violent or other specific mindset may coalesce and likeminded individuals may coalesce and react as one.
A current new kind of menace, a flash mob, descending on a store for looting or upon any place of a gathering of unsuspecting targets will surge toward, not away from, the source of the voice and the words. Yet, in the times we live in, it is almost silly to call upon mere words to apply some kind of common sense to a national government, either as a lone person or a cadre of political supporters.
Silly or not, they are the unspoken but clearly meant words that are being used to extend the “redline diplomatic agenda” of the United States’ current form of diplomacy. The nanny mindset, the “Don’t make me come over there” threat will have little or no effect. Is there, in real time, here and now, a legitimate belief that calling out schoolyard bully names can pass for United States’ foreign policy? Do the members of the governing bodies, from the White House uppermost crust on down, level by level of influence to the pastry chef, have to chime in and form a conga line of bobble heads in belief and agreement of whatever the punishment might be, if the maker of the threat should really actually plan to do something and ‘come over there’?
Has America, have Americans, lost the will or the backbone or the true and gut deep belief that what is good for America is also good for the world? Is the vacant and unserious and even bored tone of voice clearly understood by the threatee that nobody is really going to “come over there” and do anything to upset the almost gossamer web of what passes for foreign relations and peace among nations?
Picture it: a mob of men gathers and mills around in swarms, like flies finding a dead or dying animal. No amount of ‘don’t make me come over there’ will even be heard as the swarm descends upon or reveals an already chosen target of the mob’s thirst for, yes, blood. It is the excitement, the suspense, the video game script that is going to be performed, and red line be damned. As the mob coalesces, the blood lust heightens and someone must now become the sacrificial offering to the god of redline defiance. No stopping now from the swarm as the long knives, machetes, and weapons of centuries of mass destruction bear down and absolute and real red lines are manifest on real flesh, and heads do roll in culmination of the dare and the crossing over from human to beast and there is nothing left of the ignorant and useless admonition that was ‘don’t make me come over there’ ho hum, and in an instant the street is one redline which shouts the answer to what will happen if you make me come over there. The only sounds now are the dying screams as human morphs into beast and the redline flows into the gutter, and there is nothing that can undo the blood lust until the survivors slink away to wait for the next time.
No one came over there.
