The inauguration could get messy.

There was a time in this country when if you were caught planning an illegal event – say, disruption of a presidential inauguration – your little group just might get a visit from the FBI or local authorities.  No more.  Not even a video of a congresswoman's husband boasting of his successful ploy of hiring people to disrupt a peaceful and legal presidential campaign event prompts an investigation.  What has changed?

Disruption is now apparently the equivalent of protestation.  Illegal activity connected with emotion and blended with politics is acceptable if it holds to the fashion of those in power.  An angry Black Panther at a polling place is "understandable."  Paid protesters who cross state lines to incite and foment the destruction of property are somehow explicable and resultantly unprosecuted.

What is relied upon by these illegal disruptors is that as they break the law, they expect others to abide by the law.  As they do the illegal, they expect the legal.  They operate under the assumption that no harm will come to them from an illegal response.  The shopkeeper will not defend his property; the car owner watching his car damaged will not use illegal force.  Their crowd with baseball bats will not meet another crowd with baseball bats.

Imagine if the assumption is broken and the disruptors were disrupted by equally illegal behavior.  Imagine the hue and cry from the media and the left (pardon the redundancy).

Once we imagine the mêlée that would bloom from an equally illegal response to the initial illegal disruption, we detect the potential for a downward spiral.  This is the precipice upon which we currently teeter.

Hopefully, the inauguration will be peaceful and uneventful.  Perhaps there will be demonstrations that cause interruptions, block traffic, or worse.  And, perhaps there will be blowback by people who are simply sick and tired of this bought and paid for breaking of the law and the silent complicity from the continual nonresponsive Department of Justice.

Law must be enforced or anarchy be invited.

Most assured, and profoundly sad, is the reality that the powers charged with enforcing the law in this country seem to keep that promise only when the wind is blowing just the right way.  If and when there is a "disruption of the disruption," when the other side of the spectrum has had enough, those charged with keeping the law will finally leave the sidelines.

It need not go this far.

The current lawlessness of disrupting, rioting, and damaging property relies on the quiet response of the press, the blind eye of the Department of Justice, and the inaction of those holding the opposing points of view. 

This is not an invitation to engage in more illegal disruptions or violence, but a caution that to allow certain groups to act in such manner does indeed invite an equal reactionary response.  This is precisely why the current allowance of the planning, financing, and execution of such illegal activity must be stopped.  

We must not permit the condition to devolve.  Those who rely on the law to be enforced must be satisfied.  The thwarting of disrupters posing as demonstrators must not be from the opposing side, for that will lead to anarchy.  Instead, it must be from the enforcement of the law.  Perhaps the future will hold to this promise, to a greater degree, than what we have witnessed in the past eight years.