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If we gaze down at the bloody ground, there is much to fear and much to regret.
And it’s hard to tear our eyes away from the carnage and the moral madness around it.
A young woman, Iryna Zarutska, while riding the light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina, was slashed to death by a multiple repeat offender. Because the perpetrator was black and homeless, and the young woman white, the city’s progressive mayor showered compassion on the killer but said not a word about the victim.
A young man, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated as he engaged in open debate with students at a college in Orem, Utah. Because Kirk was a conservative MAGA activist, the left side of the web lit up in celebration over the death of a husband and father of two.
In Dallas, Texas, a sniper targeted an ICE facility, killing one nameless detainee and severely wounding two others. Although the shooter left behind a trail of angry anti-ICE exhortations, the liberal media declared his motives to be a profound mystery.
I can easily summon additional incidents, additional deaths — children at prayer in a Catholic school in Minneapolis, a health insurance executive going to work in Manhattan, two young persons employed by the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC.
In every case, the blood on the ground was that of innocents. Ordinary human beings — people with families, jobs, loves and hates, future dreams — were slaughtered for reasons comprehensible only to the politically deranged.
Kirk’s murder evoked a standing ovation from the left. Zarutska’s violent death elicited a creepy and contemptible silence. Some lives, it’s clear, are valued less than others.
As the landscape darkens, it may be natural to feel that this country has made a horrific wrong turn — that we Americans have contracted the virus of violence and should flee from each other in fear for our lives.
Or worse: that we should abandon morality and join the dirty war, cheering on attacks against perceived antagonists.
That would be a catastrophic error.
The shooters and slashers and their ideological defenders have no scheme to reform society, but they know what they hate: orderly lives, neighborliness, civility, and the spontaneous adherence to the law of the vast majority of Americans. They wish to infect all social relations with the chaos and anger agitating their minds.
I see no reason why we should assist them in this project.
Look, I’m not going to play the glad game. A small but highly vocal segment of our population has been captured by a psychotic episode. We should admit that and call them by their proper names.
Unbalanced individuals from every belief system, and none, can erupt into murderous violence. But those who rejoice over a murder, as they did with Kirk, or pretend a murder never happened, as they did with Zarutska, or lie about the motive, as they did with the Dallas ICE shooting, belong disproportionately to the progressive left.
One more example, then I promise I’ll move on.
The progressive Democrat running for attorney general in my state of Virginia has said that if he had a gun with only two bullets, he would prefer to put “two bullets to the head” of a Republican office-holder rather than shoot the evil dictators Hitler and Pol Pot. He then branded the office-holder’s children as “little fascists” equally deserving of a hypothetical death.
What healthy human mind can even conceive of such morbid fantasies?
The age of Trump has crushed the extreme left’s utopian dreams — and the left has responded with pathological behavior.
The public has every right to expect protection from the mayhem. Those who engage in ideological attacks must be punished, not pitied or glamorized.
Violent groups must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Those who celebrate bloodshed online must pay a heavy social price for their cruelty. In particular, prominent persons who play this callow game must be condemned and shamed without mercy.
But here’s the tricky part: If we fixate totally on those who hate us, we’ll end up as haters ourselves.
If we begin to treat American politics as a contest to the death, we’ll fulfill the fondest wishes of the progressive left — and even the most trivial disputes in our society will come to resemble the poisonous quarrel of two scorpions in a bottle.
Of course, we must protect our persons — but we must never abandon our ideals. The goal isn’t to eradicate fanaticism, which is an impossibility, but to remain true to ourselves.
The way to honor the victims of political violence is to conduct our lives as if that violence had never taken place — to enjoy our families and pursue our dreams in a country untainted by fear or rage.
The decisive advantage we will always enjoy over the left doesn’t rest on numbers or law enforcement but on values.
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The progressive left professes to espouse diversity but will punish any deviation from the most rigid conformity.
Normal Americans, however, know that there are many paths to perfection, many ways to be a good neighbor and a good citizen — and that our strength doesn’t reside in some physical token of identity but in the freedom to become the person we were meant to be.
The left repudiates the capitalist economy as grossly materialistic, consumeristic, and exploitive.
Most Americans understand that self-sufficiency is the first step to human dignity. They work overtime, sacrifice for their families, and feel pride rather than grievance in the process.
With the same nihilistic frenzy with which it consigns opponents to the grave, the left aims to obliterate the past, abolish our history, and topple the monuments to our old heroes.
The rest of us tend to spend less time worrying about the past than dreaming about the future. When we wish to dismiss a subject from our minds, we are liable to say, “It’s history.”
But we are also aware that the American future — that mighty swirl of infinite possibilities — is a gift from past generations that toiled, and battled, and bled so we may enjoy the adventure. We feel part of a story, the theme of which is the unshackling of the human spirit, and that story has its heroes and exemplars whose deeds we hope, in some small way, to emulate.
An America deprived of its memory would be like a lumbering Hollywood zombie — brain-dead even if unaware of it. That is precisely the expectation of the hard left.
Only if we lift our eyes from the gruesome headlines to the spiritual reality of America — that amazing “city on a hill” — and remember how to be worthy of it, and behave accordingly, will we begin to awaken from the present nightmare.
Exceptional individuals are already showing the way out of the darkness. Erika Kirk, the widow of the murdered man, has publicly forgiven her husband’s assassin. This act of extraordinary human kindness provides a model for how to defeat the forces of rage and resentment.
It’s not enough to be stronger, tougher, or more numerous than the violent minority. We must be better as well.