It was not a normal Saturday night. Typically, I am sitting on the couch, reading a book and having a couple of beers. Or if my daughter is over, we are watching a campy horror movie and laughing heartily. That night, though, I was basically home alone. My stepdaughter was in bed, and my wife had gone on a ghost-hunting tour. I was out on our back deck vibing to some music and enjoying that it was no longer too hot to be outside.
I am on Threads, largely by accident. I was curious about it on the first day it went live and clicked over, not realizing that to access it at the time, you had to sign up. So now I have a Threads account and from time to time, I pop on there just to see what is going on. The first thing I see at the top of the For You page is an all-caps post saying that someone had shot Donald Trump. My heart skipped a beat. But I was also, at that moment, in a state of full disbelief. People say dumb stuff on the internet all the time, and I figured it was just a piece of rage baiting intended game the algorithm to get clicks.
My disbelief did not last long for, seconds later, a Washington Post breaking news alert buzzed my phone and had the video right there. At that point, the news was not saying it was a shooting, but the pops before the former President went down, even to my ears that know little to nothing about guns, knew exactly what I was hearing.
I have no sympathy for Donald Trump. I do not support him in any way, shape, or form. But this moment in time made me sick to my stomach. I took to Snapchat and immediately shared some brief comments about the news, along with mentions of the passing of Shelley Duvall, Richard Simmons (whose death I found out about via a meme), and Dr. Ruth. I texted my daughter about it and one of her friends, her whole friend group has added me on that platform, messaged me. It felt like we were all trying to process this thing that was happening right in front of our eyes.
Given his rhetoric and the way he has spoken ill of others in the past, it is not surprising that the internet, a mere minutes later, was making fun of and expressing regret that the bullet wasn’t just a couple of inches further to the left. This is how we grieve now. This is how we process reality in the digital age: we make memes. We mock. We parody.
But we also form conspiracies and gather together in the discord servers to plan the next move. The January 6 riot was planned on encrypted channels after the realization that Donald Trump had lost the presidency. The tensions rose and the violence became real. Even on that day, while his supporters stormed the United States Capitol and pulled down an American flag and replaced it with a Trump flag, he encouraged it by not saying a word to the mob to stop.
At no point along the way since then has he toned the rhetoric down. He has continued to stoke the fires of revenge in his adherents’ hearts. It was only a matter of time before it happened. Just as with the protests in college campuses against Genocide in Palestine, we should have seen it coming. We have had ample time to change course and prevent it.
We have chosen not to.
Tonight, Biden made a speech from the Oval Office. In the speech, he focused on the need for us to tone down our political rhetoric so this kind of thing does not happen again. While his words were consoling, and they were clearly heartfelt, to me, they rang empty. Because we should have already toned it down. We shouldn’t have allowed it to get this far to begin with.
All blame for this event rests squarely on the shoulders of the Republican Party, and Donald Trump personally. This is not a both-sides issue. Is the political landscape heated right now? Indeed it is. But look at the newsfeed. Look at who is saying the racist, misogynistic, bigoted rhetoric. Look at who is committing the violence and look at who is encouraging it, even if not overtly. So there is nothing about this that is surprising.
The thing is, none of us are ever going to forget this day. We will always remember the day a 20-year-old tried to assassinate a former president. This is going to be in the history books. It is what we do with this memory that is the most important. Because, at this point, we have a choice. We can learn from this or we can ignore the lesson and keep doing the same thing we have been doing and leave the doors open for it to happen again.
We can seek revenge, or we can seek healing. This is not a time for thoughts and prayers. We have been thinking and praying for a long time and that does not seem to be doing any good. This is a time to actually do something. The question we need to ask ourselves what it is we are going to do.
We will remember this…For better or worse…