“They started it” is a fairly convincing argument. To ourselves, anyway. To others? Not so much.

Who starts something does yeild important information. Not just for the transgression itself, but the motivation. What did they want? And what did they get?

But focusing on who starts something tends to blind us to even more information. Including consequence. Especially the consequence of subsequent actions.

One kid jumping another at school over something the other said: that might actually say it all. While knowing who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand says next to nothing. Because the Great War that followed was an everyone problem.

Choosing to continue is starting it again.

The thing about “they started it” is that its value decreases with time and outcome.

When Democrats blocked the nomination of Judge Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, Republicans said the Democrats just started something. That response was enough to get Justice Clarence Thomas on the Court.

Everything since? That’s escalation.

“They started it” speaks to a beginning, but not an open-ended cold war. And it certainly doesn’t spark an eternal hot war. Its value is introduction and novelty. And yet, the more we rely on the novel excuse, the less it justifies.

We recognize the spark as the start. But it only matters if it becomes a blaze.

Choosing to continue conflict, retaliate, or escalate the creation of new norms is its own starting something.

Democrats no more started something in impeaching then-President Donald Trump than Trump did in seeking to steal the election. Impeachments are precedented. Republicans, however, argued that it was a start. A justification for their continuance.

This is a choice. To start something. To start a new thing. A forever thing. That is on them.

Continuing is what establishes the precedent.

Impeaching a president doesn’t start anything others aren’t willing to continue. And it is the continuing that establishes the precedent. If one person shows up, it is simply a night out. It takes another person to make it a party.

Starting something carries far too much of our imagination. Because it blinds us to the deliberate choice to turn a single event into a precedent. A thing we will always do. Or to transform an assassination into the deadliest war in human history.

How much we focus on the start only serves to deflect from the one choosing to continue a conflict.

Similarly, how much we care about precedent seems to depend on our willingness to manipulate it.

“They started it” is a political statement.

The greatest irony of debates, from the schoolyard to congress, is that we forget the entire project is political. It is an attempt to convince another of the rightness of the next action.

A student tells the principal “they started it” when he is the one sitting in the principal’s office. When he has been caught fighting.

It is both excuse and prophylactic justification. I didn’t do anything unreasonable, but they did.

This is politics. As distasteful as we may find the concept or how much we want to confine the word to government.

It is also persuasion. Our attempt to draw people to see our place in a dispute. At the very least, we want to draw their sympathy. And usually also their support.

Recognizing this, however, changes our relationship to it.

There’s a reason principals punish both students caught fighting. Not that “starting it” doesn’t matter to the students, or even the school, but because it is far less important than the fighting itself. The fighting is the problem.

And the tragic origin of the Great War reveals the other end of the spectrum. A starting trigger that led to mutual complicity everyone involved actually wanted to avoid. They just all felt they had to, claiming they all had no choice but to slaughter each other.

That sense of requirement is the fascinating flip side to the “they started it” justification. It is a profound declaration of powerlessness and therefore we must be blameless.

Which is total BS.

We aren’t powerless. We always have a choice.

Choosing to escalate and claim we were powerless to stop it is true cowardice. Or sociopathy.

Of all the examples of weak leadership and gross entitlement it is this one. The choice we claim is not choice. Someone else’s problem.

They started it. I had no choice. So you must forgive me. And condemn them forever. It’s only fair.

“They started it” is a lie told to cover up who is really starting something.