When John Hinckley, Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Ragan after he left a mid-day speaking engagement on March 30, 1981, I was an immature 16-year-old high school sophomore. I first heard about it at the elementary school gym where I was at after school softball practice. Our high school was very small, so the boys played slow pitch softball instead of baseball. I remember making a comment to one of our coaches who was also our high school foreign languages teacher, Paul Brown, implying that it would somehow be a good thing if President Reagan had been killed. Mr. Brown was pretty young, probably only thirty if that, and likely a Democrat. I don’t remember Mr. Brown’s exact words to me, but he clearly understood that the assassination of President Reagan would not have been a good thing for our country. In fact, it would have been a very bad thing and he clearly conveyed that message to me.
I didn’t remember having any passionate hatred of President Reagan. Of course, I had been conditioned to see him as a warmongering cowboy that was going to bring nuclear destruction to the whole world by his attitude toward the Soviet Union. And of course, Saturday Night Live told us every week how dumb he was. Very, very dumb. I probably just thought the idea of a president being assassinated would be interesting. “May you live in interesting times.”
Our popular political media always tries to hype up our differences and pit “us” against “them.” I’m not sure what frame of reference people are using when they say that polarization is at an all-time high in our country. I tend to think the 1960’s, with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Civil Rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X, all during the height of the Cold War and as the war in Vietnam was ramping up and reaching a crescendo, was a pretty polarized time. I lived near Cleveland, Ohio and graduated from a Cleveland public high school during court ordered desegregation in that city and across the nation. Desegregation in the 1970’s was certainly polarizing. Wasn’t the aforementioned President Ronald Reagan considered polarizing? How about President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky? Barrack Obama? Every election seems to be billed as the most important of our lifetimes. I suppose the next election is always the most important but could your vote, or the vote of your oh so misinformed neighbor, really lead to Armageddon? Two terms of President Reagan did not lead to nuclear war but instead the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
For many when they’re young or immature, like myself when President Reagan was shot, chaos has a great deal of appeal. The idea of pouring gasoline on any hint of a flame is just too irresistible. Witnessing a conflagration, even one that is so harmful to so many people, is a passionate quest. Why try to help people reconcile their differences when inflaming passions and prodding people to throw punches is so much more fun?
This is not to say “us” versus “them” is always a bad thing. I strongly believe in “us,” as in those who stand with Ukraine, even if just in spirit, while the Ukrainians defend themselves against Russia’s onslaught, against “them,” as in those who support Russian President Putin’s invasion or justify it, is not a bad thing. But I intellectually can make the distinction between saying the invasion was justified or a good thing versus arguing about the amount of aid the United States should be sending Ukraine as opposed to the amount of aid others should be sending. Trying to stand up against what one perceives as evil is not a bad thing. Seeing everyone who has any disagreement with us as evil is a bad thing. Especially if that disagreement is slight, imagined, or blown way out of proportion for political reasons, or as click bait.
Over forty years after President Reagan was shot, I’m a 59-year-old married father of four, including a teenage son with severe disabilities. Now another who be assassin shot former President Donald Trump as he was again campaigning for president. President Trump’s injuries are much less severe than President Reagan’s were, but our nation was very close to being thrown into a very difficult time if that bullet was an inch to the side and he had been killed. As President Trump almost literally dodged that bullet so did the world. We should all be grateful for that, despite our politics. My hope would be that we all seek to hold ourselves, our candidates and their campaigns, and our political media more accountable for the words we and they use and how we characterize those we disagree with. We all can see a fascist dictator in Russia right now in Russian President Putin and Russian men blindly being led like sheep into the meat grinder in Ukraine in order to destroy a nation whose most fervent wish is to enjoy the freedoms that we in the United States too often take for granted. Donald Trump in not Vladimir Putin despite some people’s protests to the contrary. That was not President Trump and the American people in his first term, and it would not be President Trump and the American if he wins a second term. Our democracy is stronger and the American people are better than that.
I hope that out of the assassination attempt of President Trump we all make an effort to clean up our public and private political discourse, including our popular political media.