"This only gets you this"

 

I remember when RFK and MLK, Jr were shot. I was 3 at the time so I don't recall JFK's assassination but I do recall the surprise I felt at the realization it had happened in my lifetime. I remember George Wallace being shot, and Jerry Ford, and John Lennon, and later Ronald Reagan. Any time violence mars the political or cultural dialogue, it's a blow against the safety we all take for granted.

Now Donald Trump has been shot at. I say "shot at" because, even after 2 days of reporting, I have yet to discern whether he was hit by a bullet or a shard from the screen behind him. It doesn't ultimately matter because the fact remains he was shot at, and this is something we can't dismiss.

Let me first reiterate, as someone else has, that the notion this was a false flag operation by his own personnel is absolutely ridiculous because there is no way anyone would sign off on putting himself in immediate danger like this. Whether it was a bullet or plastic that struck and bloodied his ear, any nearer and we would be talking about an assassination rather than an attempt. 

Trump's raised-fist response in some photos is legitimate and I'm willing to allow he is braver or at least appears so in the clutch than I would have thought (and maybe even more so than I would be). That wouldn't make him any better a president than he was before and it doesn't change any of the wrongs he's done. It makes for a great picture, is all. Let him have it.

Here is the thing. When we move from rhetoric to violence, as has happened, it diminishes us all. It says we have given up that, in MLK's words, "the arc of the moral universe...bends toward justice." If we would be content, we can't allow anger with one another, distrust in one another, or violence against one another to dictate how we behave toward one another. 

Neither should we forget Corey Comperatore, who was struck by a bullet while shielding his family, and killed, or David Dutch or James Copenhaver, both of whom were struck and hospitalized. And we shouldn't forget Thomas Matthew Crooks, who for reasons we can't begin to guess at decided to join the ranks of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremer, Lynette Fromme, Mark David Chapman, and John Hinkley. 

At some point, frustration and rage can flare into the certainty that "I must do something, no matter who it hurts." Before any of us reaches that state, we need to recognize that it's never the right response. The right response is long, arduous, exhausting work that can't take the shortcuts provided by a fist or a knife or a gun or a bomb. President Biden put it well in his address after the shooting: “In America we resolve our differences at the ballot box... Not with bullets." But perhaps Norman Lear's All in the Family put it more succinctly when the actor Gregory Sierra, playing a Jewish vigilante, tells Rob Reiner's Mike that, "One day you're gonna find out this [making Reiner's hand into a fist] is the only answer." Mike tells him he's wrong "because this [making another fist] only gets you this."