A mob by any other name is still a mob

Posted 11/24/16

To the Editor: Who among us has not been seduced by the allure of the mob? I know I have. Everyone wants to join a mob; you just have to find the right one. As a young hippy I rode the waves of mobs that protested the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. We had

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A mob by any other name is still a mob

Posted

To the Editor:

Who among us has not been seduced by the allure of the mob? I know I have. Everyone wants to join a mob; you just have to find the right one.

As a young hippy I rode the waves of mobs that protested the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. We had "Tricky Dick" Nixon so the villain was clear. We were the angry mob and like a nation of our own we sort to rule. Shouting, stopping traffic, and smashing things, somehow in breaking the law we thought we were creating new laws. We weren't. We were wrong to do that.

That was not an impressive mob as mobs go. Not like the mob of Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. The witch was killed and they came out singing as she lay crushed beneath a fallen house. Then, like in a bad western, they stole her shoes and gave them to somebody else to wear. The hippies never did that, well, maybe they did. But, the Munchkins loved it, and even with the rotten cadaver under a house the mob rose up in song and danced around as the "good" witch descends in a bubble to gloat over her rivals demise. Everyone was so cute it made everything all right. That's a great example of just what a mob can do. How a mob can normalize very negative behavior, make us accept it, then integrate it into our lives.

Mobs seek take hate and turn it into love by some miracle of human interpretation. But it doesn't always work. Perhaps the most famous mob is the one that chased the monster Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's classic. This innocent creation of an obsessed scientist, fresh off the slab, a child unaware of what he was doing, in joyous play, accidentally kills a child. He is persuaded by the mob that sees him as a monster and like a little boy in trouble he runs and hides. Our sympathies go with poor Frankenstein. The angry mob that riots to kill him becomes the monster instead. Humanity rises to the surface as the mob becomes inhuman and vane.

That's how I view the mobs we're seeing today: the mob that descended on my home over yoga pants and the mobs that are protesting the Trump election. Like the Munchkins, no matter how cute they look, no matter how proper they try to sound, what they are doing is wrong. Like the mob in Frankenstein, they have become the monster to be feared, destructive, reckless, mindless creatures of their own creation bent on intimidation, fueled by revenge, steeped in vanity and conceit.  

Alan Sorrentino

Barrington

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