Perhaps Vance Boelter’s surface motives will turn out to be right-coded; perhaps they actually reflect some more personal grievances. No matter what, the prescription for the rest of us (left, right and center) remains the same either way: Tone down the political rhetoric.
Nabbed Sunday after a massive manhunt, the apparent assassin of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, also fingered for the dire wounding of a state senator and his wife, was plainly struggling with financial and mental health problems — after years of inflating his own reputation.
Just as it now looks like the kid who nearly killed President Donald Trump last year was disturbed, as was the guy who almost offed Rep. Gabby Giffords back in 2011 and were a host of other political shooters in the years in between.
But troubled minds and souls take cues from the world around them, and American political rhetoric has grown routinely too heated.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ call for “all elected officials from across the political spectrum to conduct themselves responsibly” is entirely right — just as similar resolutions have been in their day.
Maybe this time the lesson will sink in?
We’ll admit, we see the violence problem as worse on the left, and can’t help noticing that liberal lists of 15 years of such attacks often omit the Trump assassination attempt as well the Bernie Sanders fan’s 2017 targeting of House Republicans at softball practice that put Rep. Steve Scalise at death’s door.
But we don’t deny that it sometimes comes from the right, too.
Don’t blame the Internet; not long ago the complaints were about cable-TV and talk radio fanning the flames.
There was a time not too long ago when Americans could disagree without being disagreeable, when we didn’t treat every political dispute as an apocalyptic battle between good and evil.
The nation needs most people on both sides of the great divide to face the truth, and do better, or it’ll only get worse.
