There was a post scheduled for today, a quiet moment of reflection on the anniversary of September 11th. It was meant to be a look back at a singular act of national violence, a moment that left an indelible scar on the American psyche. But in the strange and unsettling way that history repeats itself, it seems the universe had other plans. Today’s headlines, filled with the latest unsettling news of political attacks and assassinations, demanded a different kind of reflection. It’s a sobering thought, but in a country that once united in shared grief after a catastrophic event, the violence now feels less like an external threat and more like a fever rising from within. It’s a sad irony that the day we set aside to remember a moment of great trauma is now overshadowed by our own, self-inflicted wounds.
The fabric of this nation, for all its grand proclamations, is stained with the blood of politically motivated violence. We have always had this shadow hanging over us, from the assassinations of presidents like Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, to the attacks on civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. These were moments of profound national shock, of shared grief and disbelief. But what we’re experiencing now feels less like a series of discrete tragedies and more like a pervasive, low-grade fever that has finally spiked.
And the fever is hot. We’re not just talking about history anymore; we’re talking about the present. In the last year alone, we’ve witnessed a chilling string of events. An attempt was made on the life of Donald Trump, a moment where a presidential campaign rally was turned into a scene of carnage. Not long after, another attempt was made on his life while he was playing golf in Florida. We saw the firebombing of Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence in Pennsylvania, a horrifying act of domestic terrorism aimed at a sitting governor and his family. And then, there are the assassinations of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the attempted assassinations of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, a moment that demonstrated just how close to home this violence has come for our public servants.
And just hours ago, the grim roll call of victims was expanded to include the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, whose life was taken in an act that Utah governor Spencer Cox so rightly called a “political assassination.” This isn’t just about a list of names anymore; it’s about the relentless, grinding normalization of the unthinkable. It’s a chilling reminder that the rage, the vitriol, the absolute loathing that we’ve cultivated in our political discourse, is not just empty rhetoric. It has consequences, and those consequences are proving to be fatal.
“The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in it without fear of violence. Political violence is always an attack against us all. You have to be so blind not to see that.”
Ezra Klein
There is a line that, once crossed, is incredibly difficult to un-cross. That line is the one where we start to see our political opponents as not just wrong, but as obstacles to be removed. As Ezra Klein so rightly and soberly stated, “The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in it without fear of violence. Political violence is always an attack against us all. You have to be so blind not to see that.”
And that blindness is the ultimate sin. It is the complicity of the indifferent, the silence of the cowards. We are all living in a house of cards, built on a foundation of historical memory and a shared understanding of what a society should be. And yet, day by day, we are pulling out the cards, and pretending we don’t hear the creaking. The walls are closing in, and the fire has already started. We can pretend it’s not happening, but the smoke is already in our lungs, and the ash is already on our hands. The question is not whether the collapse is coming, but whether we’ll open our eyes before it’s too late.
So what do we do? This is not a quick fix. This is a long, arduous and deeply uncomfortable process. It requires us to get our hands dirty, to challenge our own assumptions and to put aside our egos. But what’s the alternative? To continue down this road, watching as our democracy bleeds out, one assassination, one act of violence, one act of hatred at a time? I’m not sure about you, but that’s a future I’m not willing to accept.
Justin Lockridge 
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