Yesterday, an eloquent but hard right political influencer – Charlie Kirk – was assassinated, and almost immediately everyone, particularly Republicans, began to talk about the need to stop political violence.

That’s all well and good, but it’s also hypocritical and worse.

Assassination has no rightful place in a democracy, but neither does sending troops and ICE agents into Home Depots, churches, and schools and arresting and carting off people based on their color, speech, or dress, all too often sweeping up people who are American citizens in the furor of activity to deport as many people as quickly as possible, while trying to “flood the zone,” i.e., to overload the courts and local government to the point where they can’t stop illegal and quasi-legal deportations.

That sort of behavior by the federal government is also political violence, no matter how Republicans rationalize and cover it with the quasi-legal veneer of Executive Orders. Even undocumented individuals who have committed no crimes, other than being here, deserve the protection of the law.

Violence begets violence. It always has.

The way to stop violence isn’t to commit violent acts, but to follow the law – and the Constitution – in enforcing the law.

Right now, in the frenzy to deport, Trump and his allies are stirring up more unrest, fear, and violent reactions. Equally important, too many of these measures aren’t getting rid of immigrant violent criminals. That takes patient, deliberate, long, hard effort. It also takes spending money on preventive measures proven to work.

The fifty-thousand-dollar bonuses for joining ICE are turning immigration enforcement into often-violent bounty-hunting, with the greatest appeal to would-be thugs and toughs.

More empty rhetoric and more forceful measures applied indiscriminately won’t stop or even reduce social, criminal, and political violence, except momentarily where the force is being applied, and if all that force is applied continuously, it will cost far more than funding local law enforcement and community support structures efficiently.

But then, Trump’s never been interested in building strong and effective local government; he’s only interested in building a national power base to become a de facto dictator, and over time that can only increase the violence.

I listened to Robert F. Kennedy’s testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, but could only bear to listen a short time, largely because what I heard revealed that the majority of the Senators and RFK appeared either to suffer from near-complete innumeracy, or were so locked into policy positions that they appeared to suffer terminal innumeracy.

The discussion over national life-expectancy data was more than a little revealing. The life-expectancy for Americans is lower than all other western industrial countries, yet the U.S. spends more than twice as much on health care per capita.

There are several reasons for these figures. First, one of the factors lowering average lifespans of a population is high infant mortality, i.e., the death of a child before his or her first birthday. Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. infant mortality rate is fifty-fifth, and is at least twice as high as all other first-world nations. Add to that that the U.S. maternal death rate is close to five times that of all other major industrial countries and is continuing to rise.

The second factor lowering average lifespans is the percentage of the population lacking basic health care. In the U.S., roughly 25 million Americans lack health care insurance and over 100 million do not have a regular health care provider. Yet of those uninsured Americans, 74% have a full-time worker, and another 11% are working part-time. While 62% of uninsured American adults have health care debts, as might be expected, 44% of Americans with health insurance also reported health care debts.

When roughly a third of the U.S. population does not have a regular health care provider and almost half the population cannot afford even routine health care without going into debt, one might think these factors just possibly might contribute to a lower life expectancy for Americans, but for some reason, so far as I could tell, the only factor that was touched on was the high cost of medical care for those who can afford it, when the reason for lagging life expectancy lies in those who cannot afford or obtain adequate medical care.

In addition, there’s been no significant increase in the number of MDs graduating from U.S. medical schools over the past five years, despite an estimated population increase of nearly five percent.

So why don’t Senators and Representatives know these numbers… or is it that they don’t care?

Donald Trump, in various ways, has indicated that he believes the American people want – and need – a dictator, and that he’s the right man for the job.

For all of his many and terrible faults, Trump’s greatest political skill is identifying and weaponizing the problems that most concern people – and then finding the worst possible way to address each problem, usually in a fashion that appears superficially acceptable to a great many people, especially his base, but which will lead to far greater difficulties in the future.

As for being dictator… the real and very basic problem he’s attempting to address is the fact that American government in so many areas is no longer working very well, and even where and when it is, too many politicians decry the situation because whatever is being done doesn’t fit their preconceptions of the way issues and problems should be addressed.

As a result, all too often, problem after problem either doesn’t get addressed or is addressed in a way that offends a significant percentage of the population.

And people are tired of problems not being addressed and solved.

Trump didn’t create this situation. The idealogues of both political parties did by inserting extreme religious and social ideologies into the political dialogue and campaigns, and the rank and file in those parties allowed them to do so.

The result is that people are becoming more and more disillusioned with what they perceive as a barely functioning democracy and are more and more willing to accept a dictator whom they see as willing to act.

And Trump and his ever-growing legions of sycophants glory in his filling that position.

Protests against his high-handed and increasingly marginally legal (and sometimes illegal) actions won’t stop him. The only thing that will is better government getting things done, rather than getting in the way of getting things done.

And very few of Trump’s opponents seem to understand that…or perhaps they just can’t abandon ideology in favor of moderate, practical compromise. Equally unfortunately, neither can his supporters.

I have a moderately well-behaved dachshund. By moderately well-behaved, I mean that he only barks when another dog invades his territory, i.e., our property, or when he feels threatened. This isn’t a problem for me because when he’s outside, he’s always on leash.

We take a walk almost every morning, and he’s the third dog I’ve walked over the years here. Sometimes we encounter other dogs. Because Cedar City has leash laws and most people here are law-abiding, the other dogs are always on leash as well. I’ve encountered unleashed dogs less than ten times in over thirty years, and most either wanted to play or were merely curious.

The other day, however, we ran across an inexperienced dog walker with a golden doodle and another dog, which I’m fairly certain was an Italian greyhound or something similar. Knowing that Buddy Mozart is wary of strange dogs, I attempted to create a little more space.

The other dog-walker declared his dogs were friendly and proceeded to steer them directly toward us. Buddy Mozart does not like to be crowded, and he barked and backed off. I reined him in and away from the other dogs, at which point the Italian greyhound snapped his inadequate leash and pranced toward Buddy Mozart, obviously just obsequiously oblivious to the fact that Buddy Mozart had no interest at all in being friendly.

Buddy Mozart made no move toward the greyhound, but barked and growled, trying to convey that he wanted no part of the greyhound’s overtures, while the other dog-walker proceeded to have great difficulty controlling his now-leashless dog.

No person or dog got hurt. No dog bit or snapped, and Buddy Mozart and I moved away and proceeded to finish our otherwise uneventful walk.

As we did, I got to thinking about the brief encounter. The clearly clueless Italian greyhound and the man walking him reminded me of a certain type of excessively friendly person who invades your space and doesn’t understand that you’re just not up for it… and he obviously also didn’t understand dachshunds.

The first science fiction books I read (in the late 1950s) were either mass market paperbacks or, very occasionally, library hardcovers. But back then not many SF books were printed in hardcover, and most so published were “classics,” like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , H. Rider Haggard’s She, or Frankenstein .

The first paperback SF novel that I recall reading was A.E. van Vogt’s Slan, which I snitched from my mother’s SF bookcase and took to school – except it was stolen from me on the school bus. Fortunately, that occurred on the way home, and I’d finished reading it. Explaining the loss to my mother was another matter. Still, I have a particular fondness for Slan, because one of the first author blurbs I got was from A.E. van Vogt for my first novel (The Fires of Paratime, later republished in an uncut version as The Timegod).

My first eight novels were only published in paperback, except for The Fires of Paratime , which had a Science Fiction Book Club hardcover printing as well. The Magic of Recluce was my first novel with a hardcover printing.

I don’t recall ever buying a hard-cover SF or fantasy novel until I was at least in my fifties, for the simple reason that I couldn’t afford hardcovers, at least not in the quantities in which I bought and read mass market paperbacks.

When I left Washington, D.C., and moved to a MUCH smaller house in New Hampshire, to become a full-time writer, I sold most of those paperbacks, well over two thousand of them because there was no place to put them. For all that, I still have a fondness for the mass market paperback.

Those paperbacks developed two generations of readers and writers, and I’m not so sure that ebooks have the same beneficial effect, even if ebooks are much easier to store. And, somehow, to me, trade paperbacks are a compromise representing higher cost and less convenience, while ebooks lack a certain permanence, given that Amazon can erase everything.

I suppose that makes me a creator of fictional futures and fantasies with his heart anchored in the pulp paperback.