We are certainly living through an age of political upheaval, and discord, and of course this is nothing new. The 1960’s were a time of assassinations, riots, bombings, and an extremely divisive war. The 1970’s were ushered in with our National Guard shooting down four people at Kent State in Ohio, and we also saw the resignation of a US President, and more riots. In Philadelphia in the mid-1980’s the government dropped an actual bomb, an incendiary device on residents, killing eleven. In the 1990’s George Bush had our ATF attack a cult complex in Waco, burning it to the ground with children living inside.
So I do realize that what we see today, what is going on, is nothing new. I’ll be sixty-eight soon, I was around for it all, was always interested in news and politics, so I paid attention to it all.
I’ve been around for it all, and all I can say is to quote the Grateful Dead, “what a long strange trip it’s been”.
I think what we see today is different in context, we thinks ourselves more enlightened today, more educated and civilized, and so much more technologically advanced.
The idea that a gunmen can climb a rooftop, shoot, and clip the ear of a Presidential candidate, missing killing him by the mere turn of a head at the precise right moment, just sounds insane in this day and age.
Or that a gunman can hide in the bushes for hours on end at the edge of a golf course, waiting for the chance to gun down a President surrounded by Secret Service, just seems to be an impossibility in our fast moving technological age. And yet, it happened.
As we all know, last week a supposed gunman shot the very public political activist Charlie Kirk, killing him instantly. With thousands in attendance. With dozens, perhaps even over a hundred filming the event on their cell phones. With cameras broadcasting the event live.
There exists in the populace a bit of a shock, for multiple reasons. Perhaps first and foremost that we generally feel as if we’ve all advanced so far mentally and emotionally that no one would attempt to solve our differences in this manner, or that with all this advanced technology it would be much harder to accomplish the task of murdering a person in public.
And also because we’ve all come to the general agreement that this is just not the way to solve our differences, the country was so torn, and greatly saddened by the murders of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King in rapid succession, that it felt as if we’d come to the tacit agreement never to put the nation through such upheaval again.
And yet at age 31 Charlie Kirk is dead. Felled by an assassins bullet.
And despite all the advancements in technology, and all the additional cameras, and a full security team in place, in the aftermath of the killing there are questions and conspiracies now living online about this death.
All over again we are hearing the late, great, Marvin Gaye singing his protest song, “what’s going on, what’s going on…”. Over fifty years after the song’s release, I sit and wonder, “what’s going on”?
Two attempts on Trump’s life, Charlie Kirk murdered in broad daylight, and if you are living any part of your life online then you know that there is no healing to be found.
Even after an hours long celebration of Charlie Kirk’s life, attended by our President, and so many political leaders from the Right speaking at this giant wake, you can pick up “X” and find that hate rages on. There are those on the Left actually joyous over the loss of a human life. As long as that loss was someone active on the Right.
We think ourselves so advanced, so educated, so learned, so in touch in the America of 2025. We live in the age of programmed refrigerators and self-driving automobiles. We are a nation of people with more leisure time than any generation before us in history, a nation of people where only the few work at labor that leaves them exhausted each evening.
So many employees in 2025 America toiling in manual labor today are illegals, or the poor and lower class, that it leaves so many more middle and upper class to jobs in service, desk jockey’s, tied to the computer all day, working in the comfort of air conditioned offices, or even at home, where certainly there is stress, but not the complete exhaustion from coming home from the mines, or factory floor, or from carrying roofing shingles up a ladder all day.
Which makes me think we could use a bit more exhaustion in America from a daily work effort, as Americans today have so much more leisure time available to go online and foment discord, argue, and spew hatred at those on the other side of the political divide.
Reminds me of when we had children in the small country private school in the distant suburbs of Baltimore back in the day. Out in what everyone called “horse country”, in fact the tiny school had a “pony ring”, for the horse riding events that so many members of the school participated in. You know you are in “horse country” when half a dozen moms at the morning school event are still wearing their jodhpurs, and little red riding vest.
These stay-at-home moms with nothing to do all day would become involved in school events, and the school event would blossom and bloom into an extravaganza. Housewives with too much time on their hands and bored would get involved in some school fundraiser, and suddenly the bake sale would morph into a weekend event requiring a tuxedo, expensive dinner, and auction cash.
You could no longer just write a small extra check to assist the institution, now you were on the hook for a limo, a tuxedo, an expensive dress, and at least a twenty-five hundred dollar bid on a vacation for the family. Oh well, how else are you ever going to get behind the ropes at The Ocean Reef Club? How nice of a student’s family to donate a week at their posh second residence. And put on the card “Minimum bid twenty-five hundred dollars please”.
And oh, aren’t you so grateful to those bored housewives whose hubby makes so much money they didn’t have to work. And could just hang at the school all morning, figuring out ways to make any fundraising idea into Cinderella’s Ball.
How I wished the husbands would find a way to get them a filing job at the office.
We now have an entire nation of people who get home from work, they don’t even cook to add to their sense of being tired, they order Uber Eats and either begin to send selfies of themselves enjoying that expensive bottle of wine, or the photos of the children looking perfect, into the ether on Tik Tok, Instagram, and other online sites, while clicking back and forth to “X”, “Bluesky”, and Facebook to exclaim their strong and steadfast political position.
These online programs stir the soul, and increase the tension, creating a keyboard warrior Hell bent on fighting for their cause. The mood shifts, the ire rises, and previously benign texts become rabid and hateful, as the comfortable sofa becomes a podium before the multitudes online, so many of which must now be slayed with words. Words emanating from a newfound political anger.
Over time one incendiary text leads to a dozen more, the hatred builds, the words get ugly.
This isn’t 1925, the American worker doesn’t come home, eat a meal, listen to the radio for an hour, and plop into bed exhausted from a hard day’s work. Knowing they have to replicate the hard work again tomorrow.
This is 2025, and even the early morning Pilate’s class doesn’t tire anyone out. Too many leave the Pilate’s class, and head to the coffee shop for hours of “chat”. And then a long lunch with friends. For so many in America in 2025, there is no work at all.
We have become a nation of the comfortable and affluent, where, as the famously hated hotel queen Leona Helmsley once said, “only the little people pay taxes”.
I’ll paraphrase by saying, “only the illegals actually perform hard labor”.
Leaving every day Americans the ability to develop a seething hatred for their political opposition.
We’ve just morphed from Marvin Gaye to Styx, “too much time on my hands, tik, tik, tik, tik….”
and too much leisure time is leading to a nation divided. Severely divided. Even callous.
What human being would go online and write about how happy they are a 31 year old father and husband has been murdered? What kind of human being would use such a public assassination in broad daylight to rant against their political opposition?
Who has the time in their day to become so worked up and full of hate?
Apparently tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of Americans.
And while, as I have already pointed out, none of this is new, we suffered the loss of JFK in Dallas, his brother in Los Angeles, and then Martin Luther King in Memphis, and the mood of the country was so sad, so somber, that I was certain we would grow as a nation to the extent we wouldn’t have to suffer such heinous acts again.
But then Squeaky Fromme took a shot at Gerald Ford. And Ronald Reagan took a bullet in front of the Hilton in Washington, DC. In hindsight since neither President died there wasn’t the same public outcry, or sense of sorrow over those assassination attempts. These days they’ve almost disappeared from thought.
I guess we have lived through outright political warfare in every generation of my life.
But somehow I’d become convinced that we had all grown beyond assassinations. Beyond public executions. We had grown as a nation, more educated, more mature, more erudite.
Assassinations were for third world countries, the means by which the uncivilized nations of the world solved their political problems.
Here, here in the US, we debated, we had round table discussions, we used discourse to solve our differences. Guns, bullets, murder, that was for the uncivilized in the world.
And so I sit exhausted.
Not because I just climbed from deep in the mine, or carried too many squares of roofing up a twenty foot ladder. Not because I spent my day in hard labor to earn a dollar, but because the ugliness of the Left in their response to this very public execution has been disheartening.
We were all supposed to be so much more advanced than all this by now.
And unfortunately, I’m not sure we’ve yet seen the worst.
Lament...lament. Where is the real visible progress in CORRECTING this craziness?