For all of the cadet programs Kyle attended, he didn't seem to learn lessons about right and wrong, he just got to play Junior Hero. Why was someone his age, rightly turned down by the Marines, allowed to receive firearms training, given a uniform, and allowed to ride along with officers on patrol? An after school seminar or two or some safety training I could understand, but why was he allowed to accompany firefighters on calls? Why would any minor be treated as though they were receiving on the job training for either of those dangerous vocations?
But in his perpetual desire to help, Kyle sometimes seemed prone to intensifying rather than de-escalating conflicts. One widely circulated video taken early last summer appears to show him jumping into a brawl between several teenagers and repeatedly slugging a girl from behind.
I've seen that video. It didn't 'appear' to show him punching a girl from behind, then going back to punch her again. It clearly
did show him doing just that. But punching girls in the back is all about a perpetual desire to help, right?
Kyle Rittenhouse legally had no business with a gun, and he knew it. He had no business playing vigilante, and he knew that too, though he doesn't want to admit it. It was all a tough guy game until he killed two people and got arrested for it. His life sounds like it hasn't been a picnic before he threw it away, but there are plenty of other people out there with similar stories who don't fixate on the police and military, illegally buy a gun, then use social unrest as an excuse to run out and shoot people dead.
The article spends too much time trying to play him up as a good kid who just got confused and made a little mistake, and conservative white people are upset and feeling aggrieved these days, and BLM was just so unruly, and, and...
Like George Zimmerman before him, Kyle Rittenhouse has become more an icon than an individual. His actions in Kenosha were the result of two intertwining motifs of the Trump era: a distorted ideal of personal freedom beyond restraint or consequences, and a conviction that "law and order" is something that applies only to one's enemies, never to oneself. Together, those threads of twisted logic gave Kyle the audacity to show up in a city that wasn't his, with a rifle he couldn't legally own, believing he was the one with the law on his side. In picking up a weapon, he himself became weaponized - not just by the far right, but by the highest reaches of the federal government.
George Zimmerman is an icon? Ri-ight. And little Kyle is still painted the victim rendered powerless by circumstance. Yech. This kid was not 'engulfed by the chaos' - he went looking for it. He found it.
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