That’s the core of the moral dilemma. It exists because one side says to take such action is wrong but the other side has no problem doing so, and in our hesitation the most vulnerable are abused, raped, and slaughtered. They currently don’t understand any language but violence, so at what point do we respond to them on their terms? We’ll carry the burden of what we’ve done for our lifetime because we recognize that human beings are human, even one as vile as Trump. He and his kind are irredeemable because no amount of appeals to goodness will sway them from their course and every day you spend trying to reason with them is another day their hate and power has to abuse the most vulnerable. You could lock them away and prevent that individual from causing harm, but that’s a singular solution after the fact and life has shown the threat of such consequence does nothing to stop such people from acting on their impulses in the moment. At what point do people who’d prefer not to harm other people decide that violence is violent but the only means of preventing others from committing it? When does their intolerable behavior come full circle and become a solution we find tolerable? At what point do individuals start putting themselves between the victim and the victimizer but instead of self sacrificing in an effort to slow them down, meets violence with violence and ends the threat?

I guess the point of becoming like them is that we do so not for our personal satisfaction or gain, as they do, but to try and eliminate the threat to those who can’t defend themselves presently and give those who will come after us a better foundation upon which to build their version of society. My grandfather fought Nazis in WWII, and while he never shared all the details I know at some point he was forced to kill indoctrinated kids with guns because if he didn’t he and his would be killed and the regime they were seeking to topple would continue doing what they were doing. It’s a shit reality and I know he carried the burden of what he had to do for the rest of his life, but he survived, they didn’t, he came home and spent the remainder of his years being a decent human being, they forfeited their chance at that because they fought for a cruel version of society. I don’t want to have to embrace the kill or be killed mentality, but at what point do we accept it’s come to that stand our ground on the terms they’ve set?