Our Ratchet Society

I’m a shop tool guy, and a favorite is the ratchet strap. Seriously. I worked in a scene shop filled with tools for 30 plus years. I own a hammer that has been with me nearly 40 years. I have screwdrivers of all shapes and sizes. I have paint brushes that are probably older than my kids. I have saws and drills. Yet, the ratchet strap is a favorite.

I can use a ratchet strap for it’s intended purpose- to hold down cargo. I can also use it to pull and hold two parts together, such as when gluing joints on a chair, or trying to move a couple of heavy items closer together.

With all the good things that a ratchet can do, it also has a fatal flaw. It is possible to tighten a strap to the point that you can’t get it loose again. See, a ratchet is a sprocket built with a set of teeth that are rounded on one edge, and have a hard notch on the other. As the ratchet is tightened the ratchet latch rides over the smooth part of each tooth, then drops into the hard notch, holding tight. Do that again, things get a little tighter. Every click of the ratchet tightens things just a little more.

The problem comes in the release. To release a ratchet, you actually have to pull it a little tighter, then, as the tension is taken off the latch, you release it and the ratchet uncoils. If you have it too tight, you can’t turn the ratchet enough to get the latch to release. Either the mechanism breaks or you damage (or destroy) your strap. In some cases, that strap can snap back and actually injure or kill the person trying to use it.

I am trying not to pay attention to the goings on at a court room in Kenosha, WI. Kyle Rittenhouse is on trial for the shooting murder of two men, and the gunshot injuries of a third in the middle of a public street during a riot. Yesterday Mr. Rittenhouse took the witness stand, he started to tell his side of the story, and began to sob. Big sobs. The kind of sob that you expect from the last act of a television crime procedural when the killer, who has been denying his guilt is finally broken by the heroic protaganist. And I despise the young man for that sob.

Mr. Rittenhouse was, at the time of the murders, a 17 year old kid. A 17 year old kid with a rifle, who, (assumingly) had been wound tighter and tighter through media, and through conversation with other like minds. He was a ratchet strap of a young man, wound so tight that only a gunshot could release that tension, through fear, through anger, through self-justification. I’m only speculating on much of this. His final motivations are his, but patterns fit, as does the archetype of the situation.

All of that said, this isn’t about Mr. Rittenhouse specifically.

I’ve been doing a lot of goat research lately (long story). Goats are incredibly social animals who live by a strong hierarchy, determined by mutual agreement and by fighting. Two goats can approach each other, and one can basically say to the other, “you know what, you’re tougher than I am. I concede.” or they can confront each other and decide who is higher on that hierarchy by, literally, locking horns and butting heads. Occasionally there will be a fatality, but that isn’t the goal. When a new goat is introduced into that community, the hierarchy is reestablished through age old tradition of agreement or combat.

Human beings, we are no different. When we meet someone new, we have a sort of unwritten agreement of hierarchy. Meet a guy briefly on the street and we are equals unless otherwise proven. On the job, we have boss after boss after boss. The same in a social setting, where we will either agree, or discuss, or argue. 

Where the goat has an advantage over a person is in the baggage introduced. Goats take their confrontations at face value and settle those confrontations with force of body against body. There can be lethality from the horn, but, again, that is not the goal of the confrontation. We humans on the other hand, well, we go into a confrontation thinking that we know more than we do before we even try to work things out. Our twenty first century information society easily divides us into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, with all the inherent early threat warnings that go along with that. 

We tighten the strap just a bit.

We can confront each other, knowing that this could lead to argument, a vocal fight of sorts that could, in the right settings, grow into a physical confrontation. A lot of wrongs have been righted through the years this way. Or not.

We tighten the strap just a bit.

Because, when we walk into a situation with the certainty that we already know the person on the other side of the table because of years of having been told to “watch out for them. They are dangerous” we believe this, because this frame of reference is better than no frame of reference at all. It doesn’t matter if its ‘Bloods and Cryps’, Antifa and far right groups, or Liberals and Conservatives. We’re readied for a confrontation.

We tighten the strap just a bit.

And then, where talk or, at worst, fist fights should have ruled the day, we introduce a weapon into the mix. It used to be a rock…

We tighten the strap just a bit.

Which grew to a branch or pipe…

We tighten the strap just a bit.

Which grew to knives…

We tighten the strap just a bit.

Which grew to firearms; handguns and rifles…

We tighten the strap just a bit.

And, suddenly, with no apparent idea why, we are living through a situation where a 17 year old kid from Antioch, Illinois traveled half an hour to Kenosha, Wisconsin with the notion that it was his civic duty to be there, armed with a rifle designed to look like a military weapon.

We tighten the strap a whole lot more.

Add to the tension the sounds of people screaming at each other, the smell of smoke and teargas, and the police rolling by, seeing the teen and thanking him for being there, then tossing him a bottle of water in appreciation (irony that, in Wisconsin, police in the midst of a riot can give thanks and a bottle of water to a an underaged, armed, white, teen ager, while in Texas it is now against the law for a bystander to give a bottle of water to an old man standing in a voting line. I guess that’s another discussion…)

We can barely move the strap, but we get it to click just one more time.

At one time it was fairly well accepted that, if confronted, your first duty was to retreat to your home or safe area, and deescalate the situation (except in one’s home, where you usually could lethally defend yourself). Laws change, and suddenly ‘Stand your ground’ comes into vogue, a law that says that, if one feels threatened, one has the right to defend oneself anywhere in whatever manner is seen fit. In a world where we are told that ‘They’ want to harm or kill us, the threshold of right to defend oneself becomes pretty low. Not all states have this law (both Minnesota and Wisconsin are ‘Duty to Retreat’ states), but that attitude doesn’t stop at the border.

And, suddenly, we learn that we tightened the strap too far and can’t get it loose.

We can’t talk with others out of a tough situation anymore.

We can’t find common ground, either on physical territory, or in philosophy.

We figure that we need to be armed as heavily as the guy on the other side probably is.

We can draw weapons in the middle of the bar over being jilted, and injure or kill 14.

We can feel threatened in Florida and gun down a black teenager wearing a hoodie.

We can feel threatened and shoot through our front door at a young lady on the other side who is knocking because she is scared and needs help with her stalled car.

We can feel threatened in any city in the United States, drive the streets and highways, and shoot at a driver who, in our mind, has cut us off.

We can kill children in their carseats because an errant bullet, meant for someone else, can pass through a car door and into that child, who was eagerly awaiting a happy meal.

We can kill children in their homes because an errant bullet, meant for no one in particular, can pass through a house and into a child napping in her own living room or bedroom.

A firearm is a tool. It’s as simple as that. When the NRA says that “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” they are exactly right. A shop tool is only as good as its craftsperson. A firearm is only as safe as its gun holder.

A ratchet strap over tightened can injure or kill. The same is true for the user of  a firearm. We have got to get this through our thick, goat stubborn, heads. We have to find a way to work past the nonsense arguments and prompting of fear spouted by those on the far sides of the topic (and their corresponding media), and find a way, find some common ground, to start to release (disarm, if you will) the tension held between our fellow citizens. If we don’t it will kill us all.