Bad Reactions, Right and Left, Etc.

To state the obvious: there are a lot of bad--dangerous, that is--reactions to the Kirk assassination on both ends of the spectrum (not that the very idea of the political spectrum is without its problems, of course).

   On the left, there's a lot--a lot--of outright exultation. It's repulsive. Some of these people can barely contain their joy. There are many calls for more murders...whole lists of conservatives, some with Kirk's name struck out, and comments like: One down, many more to go...

   And this is the sort of thing that makes the Kirk assassination less like an aberration of contemporary progressive-left ideas and more like a predictable--even intended--consequence of them.

   On the right, there are a lot of comments to the effect that the time for talking is over, comments rejecting calls to "turn down the temperature," comments to the effect that the time has come to fight fire with fire... And the crazy fringe of the right is always a powder keg, IMO. There's a whole little world of lone wolf wackos and militias out there who are always waiting for an opportunity to cosplay Minute Men. This is the opportunity they've been waiting for.

   And the more people on the right say things like this, the less aberrant and exceptional acts of violence from the right will seem--and be.

   Trump is, I would say, not helping. He's said some good things and he's said some bad things...which, under some conditions, might be acceptable. But this is a time when we need a President to do more than give us a mixed bag of good and bad. We need a President who'll move the national mood in a better direction. This isn't a time for merely treading water. It's hard to move from a state like this to a better one. It's easy to make things worse. Trump's always been a gamble. One of the things reluctant Trump-supporters gambled on is that something like this wouldn't happen. Well, we lost that part of the gamble, it seems. Trump is not the man you want to rely on under conditions like this.

   This isn't supposed to be a call for hysteria. We still have time to cool things off and steer the ship of state away from the iceberg. But it seems to me to be a damn dangerous time, and, as I've said, I'll be somewhat surprised if we make it out of this without more killing. Not astonished--but somewhat surprised.

   To again quote The Great Man:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.