Like most Americans, I have been unsettled at best and profoundly frightened at worst since the last Thursday of June, the night of the Joe Biden-Donald Trump debate. That was the first bookend enclosing what I can only think of as the climatic unraveling of our political process and perhaps of our nation.
The second bookend snapped into place just over 2 weeks later when a young man, a registered Republican, attempted to assassinate former President Trump and successfully killed a volunteer fireman who was shielding his family as friends watched on television. Two other people were seriously injured.
Anyone who thought our political process and our nation’s democracy were chugging along just fine, has been clearly, violently, and perhaps permanently disabused of that notion.
Since the shootings, there has been a steady drumbeat for Americans to “lower the temperature,” “dial back on,” “take a deep breath,” and otherwise back away from our overheated, divisive, and truly ugly political rhetoric. It is almost as if we now care more about our partisan identifications than we do about our nation. I could not agree more, but the question now is whether we have already crossed some invisible but very real line in our politics, whether we have already slipped off the edge and are falling into the abyss.
Like many Americans, very likely some who read this essay, I no longer feel the same way about individuals in my personal orbit, both family and friends, who hold opposing political views to my own. I suspect they feel the same way about me. Some Americans have ended long and close relationships over political differences, something I could not have imagined in my younger years. Historians tell us Americans have not been this divided since the years leading up to our Civil War 150 years ago.
If I were a fairy godmother, I would wave my magic wand and make it possible for Democrats and Republicans to discuss rationally, calmly, and civilly the issues that have driven wedges into our nation’s political heart---our diversifying society, immigration, the availability of weapons like the one that struck the former President. Yelling and name-calling have only made the issues more toxic and the divisions deeper.
Perhaps after the two national political conventions end next month and the Presidential campaign proceeds in earnest, at least some Americans will have come to see that the last two decades of escalating political tension and increasing tolerance of both violent language and violence itself have gravely wounded our country and threaten our national survival.
Up & Coming Weekly publisher Bill Bowman and I have been friends for many years, despite differing political viewpoints. He has never asked me not to write from my heart, and I am sure he has had occasion to defend some position I took to others who disagreed with it.
That said, Bill and I, loyal Americans both, agree on the danger our country is facing if we, Democrats and Republicans, are unwilling or unable to dial back our rhetoric and talk to each other honestly and with less rancor, our children and grandchildren will live in a very different America than he and I — and you — have enjoyed.