and othersOn Saturday, I, like millions of my fellow citizens, watched in horror as an assassin attempted to kill former President Donald Trump. This was not an attack on former President Trump and innocent people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to attend a political rally. It was not an attack on the Republican Party.
It was an attack on American democracy itself.
Political violence has become a normal part of our divided and embattled nation. From the attack on Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 to the shooting of Republican Steve Scalise in 2017 to the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, last year, and the horrific attack this weekend that left one of our own citizens dead, we are increasingly settling our differences not with ballots and votes, but with bullets and violence.
In this cold war, now catastrophically approaching a boiling point, neither side can gain the moral high ground. I wish someone would tell my fellow Appalachian, J.D. Vance.
“The Biden campaign’s core argument is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the Ohio congressman tweeted last night in response to the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “This rhetoric led directly to the assassination attempt on President Trump.”
JD Vance is a Republican. I’m a Democrat. He’s anti-abortion, I’m pro-abortion. He supports the MAGA movement, I don’t. He’s currently the front-runner to be announced as Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election. I’m a freelance writer and a student of Appalachian Studies at a small local college. He and I are different.
We are eerily similar: Vance was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio in 1984. I was born in 1986 and grew up 30 minutes from him in Dayton.
His family is from Breathitt County, Kentucky. My family is about an hour drive away from me in Leslie County, Kentucky, where I graduated from high school.
We both have mothers who played important roles in our lives. We are both the first in our families to earn four-year college degrees. We are both very proud of our Appalachian heritage and Kentucky roots. Vance wrote a book about them (the premise of which I don’t entirely agree with, but which has resonated with many). I write a lot about my upbringing.
These similarities should far outweigh our differences, and if they don’t, something is fundamentally wrong.
The first article I wrote for this news publication was about eight years ago. Donald Trump had just been elected, and I wrote about how I had stopped speaking to relatives who had voted for Trump.
I am speaking to them now. In fact, I have written that my initial assumptions were wrong. Some of my dear friends are Republicans. Some of my family members believe that homosexuality is a sin. Even though it has been hard, I have learned to tolerate them because the ties that bind us and the values we share are greater than the sum of our differences.
After all, we know who we are.
We are Americans. We have never agreed before, and we are unlikely to ever agree again.
I don’t write as a journalist, but I am a journalist. I don’t write as a Democrat, but I am a Democrat. I don’t write as a gay, but I don’t write as a socialist, but I am both.
Today, as an American, I simply say: This cannot continue.
The motto of my beautiful and beloved home state of Kentucky is “United we stand, divided we fall,” a motto that is an honest, if tragic, legacy to us.
The Bluegrass State is something of a national contradiction. We are staunchly Republican in national politics, but we almost always elect a Democrat for governor. During the Civil War, both flags bore the star. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both born in our state. Only one of those two presidents survived the war.
I have been a vocal critic of both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, but I recognize, perhaps without Mr. Vance’s knowledge, that some of the rhetoric used by my allies has led us to this point.
I try to be thoughtful and rational in my choice of words, but I have said things I regret, and I think most of you have, too. There is a lot to be said for criticism.
But now is not the time to point fingers at others. Our country needs to take a breath and take a long look at ourselves in the mirror. Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be?
President Lincoln pondered these very questions in his first inaugural address in 1861. From the sandy beaches of South Carolina to the dry deserts of West Texas, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union.
By the end of the year, Kentucky had both Union and Confederate governments. Guerilla warfare terrorized the nation. Brother fought brother at Cumberland Gap, Mill Springs, Perryville, and further afield, at notorious battlefields that remain in the national memory: Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Gettysburg.
Abraham Lincoln called for unity in the face of catastrophe, using his inaugural address as a last-ditch effort to stave off civil war. “We are friends, not enemies,” Lincoln said. “We ought not to be enemies.”
We should not be enemies.
This is the most dangerous moment our Republic has faced since the fall of Fort Sumter. Hideki Tojo may have attacked Pearl Harbor, and Bin Laden may have toppled the Twin Towers, but neither of them posed as grave a threat to the survival of this great experiment in self-governance as we ourselves do.
“Though passions be strained, we must not sever the bonds of our affection,” President Lincoln continued, “the mystical strings of memory which stretch from every battlefield and patriot’s grave throughout this vast land to the hearts and hearths of the living will, as they surely will, raise the chorus of the Union when they are touched once more by our good angels.”
Anguished people are urging their leaders to lead us out of this crisis and prevent us from falling into a crisis the likes of which has not rocked this continent in more than a century and a half.
We should not be enemies, and I truly believe the American people understand that. Our leaders need to catch up.