Over the weekend, a man hopped the fence surrounding the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, used a hammer to break windows and then threw Molotov cocktails into the home where Josh Shapiro, his wife, his four children and family friends were sleeping.
Shapiro and the rest were safely evacuated. But the damage was extensive.
This is only the latest incident of violence directed at political leaders in recent years.
We just lived through a presidential campaign in which there were not one but two assassination attempts against Donald Trump. A man with a hammer nearly killed Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi. Steve Scalise was nearly murdered by a shooter at a practice for the congressional baseball game. Authorities foiled a kidnapping plot targeting Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
There are more. But you get the idea.
The tendency these days is to immediately blame one side or the other for this rise in targeted political violence. To insist that this all grew from a single seed — that either Democrats or Republicans alone planted.
Which, to my mind, reinforces the problem. We got here not because of a single person or party. And we won’t get past it by simply trying to lay blame.
My fear is that one of these times an act of political violence is going to succeed. And that, as in the case of Luigi Mangioni, there are going to be a not-insignificant number of people who privately (and maybe even publicly) celebrate.
Down this road lays inhumanity. And we will never get where ANY of us want to go by heading down that road.
We should ALL listen to what Shapiro said in the wake of the arson attack on his home and family. Here it is:
“We don’t know the person’s specific motive yet. But we do know a few truths. First: This type of violence is not OK. This kind of violence is becoming far too common in our society. And I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another or one particular person or another. It is not OK, and it has to stop. We have to be better than this.”
Yes to every word of that.
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