Will We Ever Be One Nation Again?

And do we even want to be?

When the deranged John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, and the President was taken into the operating room, he quipped to his doctors that he hoped they were Republicans. “We’re all Republicans today, sir,” one of the surgeons supposedly said.

America was bitterly divided over whether we should help the allies for the first two years of World War II, but as soon as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the nation was as close to unanimous as a people can get. Even when Franklin D. Roosevelt began instituting what were seen as radical measures to save the country in the depths of the Great Depression, the rich and especially the CEOs of major corporations mostly supported him for the first 100 days, because they feared the alternative was total economic collapse and perhaps Communism.

More recently, we were nearly completely united this week in 2001 after the radical Islamic terrorist attacks on our country.

But is there anything that could similarly unite us today?

Sadly, and to my horror, I gravely doubt it. Look at the reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk, a repellent little demagogue if there ever was one. There were a few —not that many — liberals, or whatever they are called today, who tastelessly gloated a bit over his death. But there was an explosion of hate on what we used to call the far right, blaming “liberals” for his murder, etc.

In fact, while we don’t yet know the shooter’s precise motivation, he seems to be very much like nearly all the assassins and would-be assassins starting with Lee Harvey Oswald: A 20-something white male without a career or a significant other or much else going on in his life. While he supposedly hated Kirk for stirring up hatred, I strongly suspect the shooter had the ideology of a lonely junkyard dog.

Much of this is due to the decline of trusted and reliable media; much of it is due to the lying sociopath we have reinstalled in the White House, and the utter contemptible corruption of the Republican Party.

I do not know how to overcome this; I only know we must, if we and our children are to have any future. This is not a time for bullshit “objectivity;" this is a time for each of us, in their own way, to stand up and be counted for decency and honesty and democracy. It should be perfectly clear what we’ll get if we don’t.