Like so many millions of my fellow citizens, I watched in horror on Saturday as a would-be assassin came perilously close to murdering former president Donald Trump. This was not just an attack on him and those innocent people simply exercising their First Amendment right to attend a political rally. It was not just an attack on the Republican Party.
It was an attack on the very fabric of American democracy.
Political violence has become a norm in our divided and beleaguered nation. From the 2011 attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to the 2017 shooting of Republican Steve Scalise to the attack last year on Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, to this weekend’s horrific attack which left one of our fellow citizens dead, we are increasingly solving our differences not with ballots and votes, but bullets and violence.
Neither side in this cold civil war, now cataclysmically close to boiling point, can claim the moral high ground. Would that someone told my fellow Appalachian, JD Vance.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the junior senator from Ohio tweeted last night following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
JD Vance is a Republican. I am a Democrat. He is anti-abortion; I am pro-choice. He supports the MAGA movement; I do not. He is currently the favorite to be announced as Trump’s running mate for the 2024 election; I am a freelance writer who studies Appalachian Studies at a small local university. We are different, he and I.
We are also eerily similar. Vance was born in 1984 and grew up in Middletown, Ohio. I was born in 1986 and grew up 30 minutes from him in Dayton.
His family is from Breathitt County, Kentucky. Mine is from an hour down the road in Leslie County, Kentucky, where I graduated high school.
Both of us have mamaws who played formative roles in our lives. Both of us are the first in our families to achieve a four-year degree. Both of us are immensely proud of our Appalachian heritage and Kentucky roots. Vance wrote a book about them (one whose premise I profoundly disagree with, but that resonated with many); I often write about my own upbringing, too.
These similarities ought to far outweigh our differences. Something has gone profoundly wrong if they don’t.
The first article I wrote for this news publication was nearly eight years ago. Donald Trump had just been elected, and I wrote about how I was no longer speaking with my Trump-voting relatives.
I’m speaking to them now. Indeed, I’ve written about how I was wrong in my initial assumptions. I have friends I love who are Republicans. I have family members who think homosexuality is a sin. It has been hard, but I have found grace for them because the ties that bind us and the values we share are greater than the sum of our disagreements.
At the end of the day, we know who we are.
We are Americans. We’ve never agreed before. We’re not likely to agree in the future.
I write not as a journalist, though I am that. I write not as a Democrat, though I am that, too. I write not as a gay man, nor a socialist – though I am both those things, as well.
Today, I write simply as an American, simply to say: We can’t go on like this.
The motto of my beautiful and beloved home, Kentucky, is: “United we stand, divided we fall.” It is a motto we come by honestly, if tragically.
The Bluegrass State is something of a national paradox. We are staunchly Republican in national politics, but we elect a Democratic governor more often than not. We had a star in both flags during the Civil War. Both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born in our Commonwealth. Only one of those presidents would survive that war.
I am a vociferous and prolific critic of both Donald Trump and JD Vance. But I recognize, as perhaps Vance does not, that some of the rhetoric used by my fellow travelers has led us to this point.
I strive to be deliberative and reasoned in my word choice, but I have said things I regret. I imagine most of you have, too. There is blame to go around.
Now is not a time for pointing fingers, though. Our nation needs to take a breath and a good long hard look in the mirror. Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be?
President Lincoln pondered those very questions in his first inaugural address from 1861. Seven southern states, from the sandy beaches of South Carolina to the arid deserts of West Texas, had seceded from the Union.
By the end of that year, Kentucky would have both a Union and Confederate government. Guerilla warfare terrorized folks at home. Brother fought against brother at Cumberland Gap, at Mill Springs, at Perryville and at battlefields farther flung made infamous in our national consciousness: Shiloh, Chickamauga, Gettysburg.
Pleading for unity in the face of catastrophe, Abraham Lincoln used his inaugural address as a last-ditch effort to stave off civil war. “We are not enemies, but friends,” Lincoln said. “We must not be enemies.”
We must not be enemies.
This is the most dangerous moment our Republic has faced since the fall of Fort Sumter. Tojo may have attacked us at Pearl Harbor and bin Laden may have knocked down our Twin Towers, but neither posed as grave a threat to the survival of this great experiment in self-governance than we ourselves do at this moment in time.
“Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection,” President Lincoln continued. “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.”
A nation in pain cries out for leaders to guide us from this crisis, not plunge us into one the likes of which has not so rocked this continent for more than a century and a half.
We must not be enemies. I believe with all my heart and soul the American people understand that. We need our leaders to catch up.