America needs to cool off
By Michael Brooks
Editor/General Manager
In 1981, an assassination attempt was made on President Ronald Reagan. Reagan was shot indirectly in his left armpit, when the bullet ricocheted off a vehicle.
In 1986, I was watching live as the Challenger space shuttle exploded.
Every generation has several moments of extreme horribleness that will forever be burned in their collective minds. For an older generation it was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
I was too young to remember the attempt on Reagan’s life, but what happened on Saturday in Pittsburgh is something I will never forget.
We live in an America that is divided between extreme factions.
Some don’t like former President Donald Trump because he is a loud-mouth arrogant New York jerk. Some don’t like President Joe Biden because he sometimes seems to not know what is happening.
I don’t like either of them. A lot of people don’t like either of them, but will be voting for one in a “best-of-two-evil’s” kind of ways. That seems to be the way most elections have been in my lifetime. I grew up loving
The Simpsons and a line from an episode when Al Gore and George W. Bush were running for president is as true today as it was then- “Election 2000: America flips a coin”.
Trump has told numerous lies about the Biden administration. The Biden administration has pushed lies about Trump as truths, even after seeing they were wrong.
The economy is a mess. Nobody takes accountability for anything. And instead of listening to what the other side is saying, most people just believe everything their chosen candidate is saying and demonize the other side.
I believe this heated political climate is what caused the assassination attempt on Saturday. We know very little at this time about the person that was killed by the secret service. We could find out his motive and I may be completely wrong, but the fact remains this happened and it was terrifying.
It would be terrifying if it had happened to President Biden too. The fact that someone was pushed so far in his beliefs he felt he needed to kill a potential President is extremely concerning.
“Can’t we all get along” is something that will never happen in the U.S. but usually we can at least get along well enough to begrudgingly accept whatever the other side is talking about because, well, we are stuck without additional choices in a democracy.
Hopefully this is an incident that doesn’t occur for another 40 years (or longer) but in this volatile country we live in now, I see more of this coming.
I hope I am wrong.