Lost in the national angst over the Charlie Kirk assassination last month were a couple of other dramas indicating America is losing whatever is left of its composure.
Naturally, with this being a month since the Kirk killing, and Americans with our famously short attention spans, the other dramas have essentially been forgotten — which is one more sign of America coming undone.
On the same day that the political agitator Kirk was gunned down while speaking to a college crowd in Utah, a 16-year-old kid described as racist and antisemitic brought a gun to his high school near Denver and shot a couple of classmates.
The classmates, hospitalized, were listed in critical condition. The shooter turned his gun around and fatally shot himself. All of this happened precisely as the chaos was unfolding around the Charlie Kirk killing, which meant the shooting of innocent high school kids got utterly lost in the national consciousness.
Then, the day after these shootings, the brigade at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis lost its composure and nearly lost a couple of lives. The entire campus was placed under lockdown after a post on an anonymous chat platform set off rumors that an “active shooter” was roaming the academy grounds.
As the New York Times phrased it, “The false report came at a moment of heightened tension nationwide, as law enforcement agencies faced a flurry of false reports of possible shooters at college campuses and other institutions in the wake of the assassination” of Kirk.
An academy midshipman standing watch sent out an email warning to all 4,000 students: “Get inside and lock your door right now. Not a drill. Get inside and lock your door.”
With the campus under lockdown, and ambulances gathered at a staging area at the rear campus gate, rumors of the “active shooter” led to a confrontation between a midshipman and a law enforcement officer.
The middie mistook the officer for the “shooter” and struck him in the head with a parade rifle. The officer then fired at the middie, wounding him in the hand. Both victims survived.
But will America’s sanity?
The killing of Charlie Kirk was a reminder that America is no stranger to political violence.
Some of us are old enough to recall the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. That was 62 years ago next month. And yet for many of us, it remains the most dramatic political moment of our lives, and the beginning of a tragic unraveling of America’s sanity.
Sixty-two years ago, we thought assassination was an aberration. Now, we take it as part of the routine American narrative.
We’re so accustomed to it that we’ve already got our arguments rehearsed and ready to be recited. Can anybody hear “thoughts and prayers” filling the air? Can we spot the familiar line in the sand separating the “gun huggers” from those declaring the Second Amendment an outdated antique not worth the life of a single child?
And yet, tiresome as those sentiments may be, they’re a lot healthier than some of the bile that followed Kirk’s killing.
Before police had even grabbed a suspect, President Trump was blaming “the radical left” for “the terrorism we are seeing in our country today.”
Naturally, this unleashed all the Trump sycophants to echo him.
“They are at war with us. … What are we gonna do about it?” said Fox News host Jesse Watters. “Everybody’s accountable … the politicians, the media, and all these rats out there. … This is a turning point, and we know which direction we’re going.”
White supremacist Matt Forney, in a post viewed more than a million times, compared Kirk’s death to the Reichstag fire of 1933, declaring, “It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned.”
Somewhere in hell, Adolf Hitler was smiling at the sentiment.
Such language is not only the immediate, irrational reaction in the heat of the moment. It is also the sound of the nation’s biggest loudmouths making things worse as America struggles to hold on to its composure.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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