Leland Vittert of NewsNation has been making the point for weeks, but when he said it on a radio program Sunday night, a lightbulb came on for me. He was talking about the Iran war, but it might as well have been about our society generally, a society that has forgotten the necessary task of persuasion on matters that matter.
Pastor Tim has already written about this in light of another assassination attempt on either President Trump or other members of the administration.
Many people are unhealthily and dangerously angry, and it seems like it’s getting worse.
Tonight, I can’t stop thinking, this isn’t the way. A third assassination attempt against President Trump was all too narrowly thwarted mere months after the actual assassination of another national political figure. We need to treat the illness these evil acts are the symptoms of.
It needed to be done, but the adults hadn’t done it, so I thought I would. The result was a useful lesson. One that was painful both to me, who was guilty, and to many others, who weren’t. I never would have supposed that many years later it would become the kind of mistake the president of the United States would repeat on a much larger scale.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it was obvious, wanted to be as far away from this stinker as he could get. He didn’t, it seemed, want to be soiled with whatever the Secretary of Defense (“secretary of war” in his own delusions of grandeur) had been rolling in.
Okay, yes, it was my fault that the propane ran out before I ordered a refill. It was not my fault, though, that the internet went down, forcing me to watch a bit of the Olympics.
So far, 2026 brings to mind Dorothy Parker’s legendary sigh, “What fresh hell is this?” It’s said to have been uttered when her doorbell rang, but it has other uses. Applied to our current year it makes Parker seem a prophet (though her politics and choices of friends tended to be terrible).
The political forces tell us we must choose. Either the “ICEstapo” executed a heroic nurse this weekend as a precursor of the new holocaust or ICE is the most elite law enforcement agency ever assembled and anyone who dies had it coming. Mercifully, more of us are refusing these absurdities, but there aren’t yet enough of us.
Are you happy with 2026, now that the first month is almost half over? Me neither.
The last week has been like one of those bizarre times in which you notice that nothing makes any sense, so you must be having a dream. With that realization, you awaken.