Yesterday, the United States was shaken again. A school shooting. A targeted killing of a political activist. And I sit here, scrolling, reading, trying to make sense of it, and I feel…Outrage. Despair. Anger. Confusion. Angst that doesn’t have a neat resolution.
I think about Kennedy. I think about Reagan. Back then, when tragedy struck, we grieved together. We didn’t call it “red” or “blue.” Violence felt like an attack on all of us, because, somehow, we still believed that all of us mattered. And we condemned it.
But now? Now, we are drowning in something darker than grief. We are drowning in division. Blame. Gaslighting. Dehumanization. Political violence is no longer a rare anomaly. It is now woven into the story we tell ourselves about “the other side.”
I remember Melissa Hortman and her husband, killed in their home earlier this year. I remember scrolling through comments, hearing people say their deaths were “the price to pay to be in politics.” And I thought: We have truly lost our moral compass. Are we really capable of feeling less for one human’s death than another’s because they belong to a different ideology?
It terrifies me. Literally. I am actually afraid. Afraid to travel. Afraid to say I care about human beings. Afraid to share that morality matters to me. Afraid to disagree with the current majority on anything.
We used to understand that humans were humans first and foremost. That we could disagree about policy and still share core values. That violence was wrong. That grief was collective. That democracy required respect across differences. That every life mattered. Every one.
We have lost that. Like completely lost it.
Today, the US is a place of black vs. white. Red vs. Blue. Left vs. Right. Us vs Them.
I can’t escape the existential terror this creates. The sense that our society is fracturing along lines that are, at best, superficial, and at worst, moral poison.
Trump himself points fingers blaming “the radical left.” Others blame “the radical right.” Social media amplifies outrage and tribalism. And somewhere in the background, real people are dying. Every day, more blood, more grief, more disbelief.
Words matter. They always have. And when leaders call the other side “vermin”, that need to be “rooted out”, the line is crossed. And it is crossed every day. Every hour. All of this creates a culture where violence stops being a tragedy and starts feeling like justification.
I ask myself, in moments like this: When did we stop questioning? When did we stop thinking critically? When did we trade curiosity for certainty?
It’s not just politics anymore. It’s identity. It’s tribalism. If you disagree, you are an enemy. Empathy is weak. Kindness is naïve. Compassion is a lie. And if you cannot see “the other side” as human, then what are we even doing here?
I am tired. I am exhausted. And yet I cannot look away. Because if we do not act, if we do not insist on seeing each other as humans, we are doomed.
Doomed to repeat the same tragedies. Doomed to accept violence as inevitable. Doomed to allow dehumanization to be normal.
And yet, there is hope. There is a choice. We can choose curiosity over certainty. We can choose empathy over tribalism. We can choose humanity over dehumanization.
We must.
If we do not, every new tragedy, whether in a school, a statehouse, or on a stage, will push us further apart. Every act of violence will feel more like an inevitability than a tragedy.
We must reject the dehumanizing rhetoric that tells us some lives matter less than others. We must insist that kindness, decency, and shared grief are not relics of another era; they are the foundation of a functioning society.
What happened to the Christianity I grew up in? Where we were taught to see each other as Jesus did. Not as adversaries, but as children of God, as human beings worthy of compassion, care, and protection. I don’t even recognize the Christian values that many espouse today.
We are at a crossroads. A critical crossroads.
If we fail to reclaim our empathy, our critical thinking, our shared humanity, we are doomed to repeat the past. And right now, it sure feels like we are.
Every life matters. Every human matters. And if we do not act as if that is true, we have already lost.