The country ought to be ashamed of itself should violence break out at, or during, President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration. There’s no place in our country for such behavior; it would be a pathetic, contemptible display.

There are no bombs or guns or fists on the end of civil discourse’s spectrum; we’re better than that, we stand for better than that, America stands for better than that. If we can’t handle ourselves without resorting to violence, what have we really meaningfully achieved in the past 250 years as a nation?

Radical political violence is like a resignation. An admittance of defeat. Some person, or people, haven’t got their way and haven’t seen what they wanted to see, and so they choose to go outside the system and do what they can in the most embarrassing and childlike of ways.

Unfortunately, there’s sometimes an almost collective fetishizing of it — like it was deserved, and, though these bystanders would never light the fuse themselves, they were glad it was lit.

They will see the news story and shake their head and mumble and say under their breath, “Ah, but I saw it coming, I’m not surprised, I see why this happened.” And they might even be secretly pleased.   

The worst part is the social acceptance of this sort of attitude. Regardless of which side of the debate people find themselves on, if they ever speak of violence or assassinations or uprisings or riots in any sort of positive light, they are in the wrong. Even if they say it in a sort of kidding manner — for we all say half as much as we mean.  

Civil discourse is a messy process, with no beginning, no end, few rules and even fewer rule enforcers. Regardless, there’s no bit of it that should lead to violence. If we cannot peacefully settle our debates, then we cannot take ourselves seriously, we cannot expect others to take us seriously and we can no longer make any sort of show at actually being the world’s best example of what a nation ought to be.    

In most all presidential elections there is some amount of intrigue, discontent, conflict — and the most recent one was an election for the ages. There was a severely divided population, two severely divided political parties, each vying for power, each at best standoffish and at worst downright nasty. But this shouldn’t be any sort of prelude to violence. There’s no place for that.    

So at 11 a.m. Friday, Trump undergoes his formal inauguration, takes the Oath of Office and is sworn in as America’s 45th president by Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts. It would be the blackest of black marks on the nation’s record should any kind of serious unrest break out in any kind of serious scale. Such would be nothing less than disgraceful.