As America contends with an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate and a sitting president’s momentous decision not to seek re-election, we need to find the reset button. The country could use a deep breath, a count to 10, a break from the 24-hour news and noise cycle.

We could use some time to put into context what happened because if we don’t, we’re surely doomed to lose whatever lesson we could have learned. With 100 plus days left in a contentious presidential campaign to choose the leader of a divided nation, that calculus gives me pause.

President Joe Biden’s announcement Sunday that he was leaving the race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris ended several weeks of speculation. While that news may have been foreseen, it was nonetheless stunning.

The recent attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life, however, was likewise stunning as it raised the specter of political violence, evidence of the worst in us.

But after the chaos, confusion and consternation of such political violence, rarely do we spend much time in reflection, to step back and pause for a moment just to get our bearings among the din and confusion.

In “Home,” poet William Alexander Percy wrote:

I have a need of silence and of stars;

Too much is said too loudly; I am dazed.

The silken sound of whirled infinity

Is lost in voices shouting to be heard.”

Percy’s words have been on my mind since a 20-year-old fired a weapon of war at Trump during a Pennsylvania campaign rally. The former president’s ear was injured, but, as the world learned soon afterward, one bystander was killed and two others critically injured in the shooting.

The shooting stopped us … for a moment. A heated presidential race is one thing, political violence surely another. The notion that the United States decides its political differences some way other than a ballot box is anathema to our way of doing things, our system, our cherished democracy to which we like to profess our fidelity.

And when those acts of violence happen, whatever sense of calm and quiet — of silence — is shattered not simply by the sound of gunfire but by the enormity of the act itself.

Welcome, then, were calls from political leaders after the shooting to “dial back” the heated rhetoric lest it play a role in more violence. Welcome and in a few cases ironic … as without a shred of self-awareness pleas for “unity” and “calm” also came from leaders whose own words are often filled with veiled threats and simmering hostility.

Many others, rather than pause and reflect, predictably raced to react, hoping to capture or control a narrative of which they know scant little. The social media eruption shortly after the shooting was replete with the weaving of fantastical tales of conspiracy and slanders spun without evidence, some from whole cloth, others only tinged with a shred of truth, too many in all caps … shouting to be heard.

When gunshots ring out in the political arena, the history of these civic traumas revisit our memory banks.

The Pennsylvania shooting left me, in Percy’s words, dazed … as I was when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated; as I was nine years later when presidential candidate George Wallace was shot and left paralyzed, as I was when President Ronald Reagan was ambushed in 1981; or as I was when Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in Tucson 13 years ago, a murderous rampage that left six people dead, including a 9-year-old, and Giffords with permanent injuries.

Some, including President Biden, said the attempt on Trump’s life was not who we were. While that certainly is the hope, the receipts are piling up nonetheless. According to researchers at Digital History, nine sitting presidents, four of whom died, have been targets of assassins. Attempts have also been made on the lives of one president-elect and now four presidential candidates. Violence has also been visited on eight governors, seven U.S. senators, nine U.S. representatives, 11 mayors, 17 state legislators, and 11 judges. That means at least 77 times, we’ve tried to settle our political differences with violence.

Nor do political persuasions make any difference: who voted for whom, who stands for what we believe, who stands for everything we detest. When the distemper of political violence arrives, it diminishes all Americans.

The week that followed the shooting, the Republican National Convention kicked off in Milwaukee, where Trump was officially nominated as his party’s candidate. And, as political conventions tend to be, loud and raucous carried each day, silence surely and politically incorrect at a nominating convention. The Democrats, now with a new name at the top of the ticket, will follow suit and sound in Chicago in about a month.

Then on to the hustings, no time to waste during the seemingly endless and noisy campaign for president.

All of which means “whirled infinity” will continue to elude us.

This story was published by Nebraska Examiner, an editorially independent newsroom providing a hard-hitting, daily flow of news. Read the original article: https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/07/22/noise-chaos-violence-require-a-pause/

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