What to Do the Next Time They Try to Kill the President
By the time you read this, the world will probably have moved on from its momentary obsession over the third attempt to murder President Trump. Bizarre, dangerous, and horrific public crimes are characteristic of our time. We’ve grown accustomed to mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and assassination attempts. These events are mundane now. Things were not always this way. As some smart aleck put it on Twitter, “I’m old enough to remember when an attempt to kill the President was big news.” We no longer live in that world.
We aren’t going back either. Whatever else three assassination attempts on the President in the last two years have to teach us, surely one lesson is this: there will probably be a fourth, maybe a fifth.
Once President Trump has exited the political arena, what then? Likely more of the same. The last few years have normalized political violence. Yes, most of it now seems to come from the left, but agitation is growing on the right as well, and it may be only a matter of time until it too spills over into lust for blood or, worse, blood itself.
We could look at all this and assume such things are far beyond our powers as individuals to respond to or to prevent. While that may be true at the political level, it is false at a spiritual level, and now, more than ever, it is important not to get the two confused. In fact, it is the confusion of these two that has led us to this spot.
What would it mean, then, to respond to these events with the spiritual powers available to us? It means, above all, asking the question: “How can I respond to times of political disintegration with even greater personal integrity? How can I get myself even more together at times when the world around me seems to be falling apart?” Simply asking these questions is empowering because they force our eyes away from the headlines, away from the world of national politics, and onto the boundaries of our personal worlds — worlds where our leverage for change is much, much higher.
To understand this, we must understand the origins of our diseased politics. Our large-scale troubles arise from disappointed hearts that seek redress for the existential difficulties of life through politics. Of course, politics proves to be an ineffective mode of solving the problems of the heart, and so resentment grows. The disenchantment grows.
Every human life is tragic, and politics cannot change this fundamental fact of existence. Forsaking the secular belief that worldly power can operate as a panacea for all our woes is a first step all of us can take to get things back into a more proper, and likely less violent, perspective.
Letting go of our exaggerated view of what politics can do is tough. For many people now, politics has become a source — if not their only source — of meaning. Absent traditional religious structures, what makes life feel meaningful is the struggle for “social justice” or to “make America great again.” Both offer the relatively powerless individual a path to participation in a great mass movement of restoration and redemption. People take this seriously. Seriously enough to kill, as we have repeatedly seen.
It’s also hard because it feels good to be the good guy in the political yarn you spin. The problem is that becoming the good guy in this way ultimately makes you miserable. Certainly, fantasies about being on the right side of history or demonstrating your virtue in light of your foes’ degeneracy soothe a person whose self-esteem is low. Vicious and vitriolic politics give us an easy target for the hate we actually feel for ourselves. They offer us a chance to let the other guy be bad for us, instead of doing the work to make peace with who we are.
To surrender such coping mechanisms would demand real change. The individual who suddenly believes neither religion nor politics offers him solace faces head-on the crisis of meaning into which the philosophical trajectory of modernity has driven us. Many, it seems, have begun to reconsider religion, particularly Christianity, as a source of meaning in an age of disenchantment. I take this to be a good thing on all levels, but beyond simple religious exploration, there is something we each can do to help stabilize our volatile time.
The answer is to prioritize the cultivation of character over the passions of politics. We can face our inner turmoil rather than project it onto the political arena. We can turn from our obsession with the halls of power to the power each of us has to balance, stabilize, and revivify our unique domains: our relationships, family, and community. We have to become less concerned with being informed and more concerned with being good.
It’s that simple. If you start now, the next time they try to kill the president, you’ll be ready. When you are anchored into your own quest for character, you are less likely to be blown by the political winds. Whatever happens, you can continue to ask yourself how you can live in integrity with your values and how best to uplift those who come into your circle. Let your personal domain manifest values other than those of the winner-takes-all world of politics.
Politics, you see, is necessarily an adversarial arena, and while it must continue to be so, its antagonistic spirit need not dominate your life. Turn your gaze inward, practice your values, look at your neighbor as more than a vote or an oppositional voice, and you will find a new spirit evident in your life — one which, no matter what happens on the national stage, will help you to knit together what has frayed.