A House Divided

Notes on political polarization, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and disaffected young men.

This post is dedicated to my friends, thank you all for being the “most you” you’ve ever been. I love you all dearly. 

It’s been just over 2 weeks since Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Butler PA, just a 40 minute drive from where I was born and raised. Upon hearing the news, I was shocked. I had only read about assassination attempts in the news and history books. In an attempt to bring some levity to my brain, one of my first thoughts was “how did Trump get shot at before RFK Jr!?” This was, of course, an attempt to mask my real thoughts. All my cynicism came cascading back, which I had spent months crawling out of. I felt angry; I felt sad. A former President shot at, in a liberal democracy in 2024? A family now without a father and a husband, Corey Comperatore, who died shielding his family when the gunshots started. Too many people on the left wishing the shooter hadn’t missed. And perhaps, least (or most) of all, a young man, just one year younger than me, who felt so disaffected that his only way of being seen was to commit such a heinous crime and lost his life in the process.

So…how did we get here? (It seems like an appropriate question, as it’s the name of this blog.) During a recent conversation I had with my friend Clare Ashcraft, she said “people say they want change, but what are they willing to give up for it? It’s a damn good question. A question I think we ought to be asking ourselves right now. 

As I’m writing this I can’t help but think of the quote from the Apostle Matthew (later echoed by Abraham Lincoln), “a house divided among itself cannot stand.” 

It seems to me that it should now be abundantly clear that we have a polarization problem. Apparently something this bad is what it takes to make us take a step back and say “what the fuck.” The mudslinging of the 2024 presidential race came to a screeching halt. The mainstream media called for unity. Biden and other prominent democrats wished Trump a speedy recovery and prayed for him. For a moment, the temperature cooled off. It seemed like, if but for a moment, we had some clarity—even if it was, in hindsight, backed by no real desire for change—like maybe we could take this as a warning sign, grow the fuck up, and look out for each other, reunite the house divided. 

Of course, that didn’t happen. No. That would be the American way—the way of the American spirit. The spirit looked out for others. The spirit that fought, but for the sake of something better. The spirit that took on that crazy experiment of trying to overcome the worst parts of our nature and to see if we could become something more—and maybe we don’t deserve that title, American, anymore. Not even 1 week after the attempted assassination, the mudslinging resumed. Donald Trump returned to his regularly scheduled program of calling his opponents crooks and cowards, bad-faith actors bent on destroying everything good about this country. Joe Biden resumed telling the American people that Donald Trump posed an existential threat to Democracy and that he must be stopped. Conspiracies about the shooter and his affiliations filled social media comment sections and Reddit threads. Investigations into his motives dominated the front pages and consumed people’s news feeds. 

Now as I’m writing this, I can’t help but feel an ache in my heart. We’ve spent so much time talking about the slanted roof, the Secret Services’ massive security blunder, the rhetoric of mainstream media, and yes, every little detail we could find about Thomas Crooks. One detail we will never find, however, is why he really did this, but we’ll spend all the time we want looking. For what? I don’t know. Comfort? An explanation for such a horrid crime? An ideological victory? A young man took a life and lost his own life and we’ve turned his struggle into an episode of Sherlock.

To be abundantly clear, I am not defending the actions of Thomas Crooks. The decisions he made were his and his alone, and he paid the heaviest price for them. I am also not saying that anyone has to or should feel sorry for him. What makes my heart ache is our conversation surrounding lonely, disaffected, young men. Can we, for a moment, zoom out?

It’s no secret that young men are being left behind, although it’s an unpopular topic to bring up. And yes, it is a statistic that the Matthew Crooks’s of the world disproportionately commit acts of gun violence. With that being said, I have long felt that our conversation around these disaffected young men is dehumanizing and has only served the onlookers. We seem to have a morbid curiosity around every facet of their lives that drove them to commit an act of violence, but we have, in my estimation, made absolutely no attempt at reaching these young men before they snap. They don’t have a voice, or at least they feel like they don’t, that’s precisely why they commit acts of violence; to get attention in a world in which they feel invisible. We leave them in the dirt, ignore their calls for help, and then we point and make them into something to ogle and gasp at from afar only when they (and the people they hurt) are no longer with us. 

When will it stop?

What are we willing to give up for change? We had our 5 days in the sun condemning political violence, and then we hopped back on the sauce. We watched as Thomas Crooks added his name to the growing list of young men who get themselves killed, and take others with them, because we ignore their pleas for help. Violence begets violence and our society as it stands clearly cannot fix these issues. The right will say we need to revitalize the role of fathers in the home, the left will say we need gun control. We all have our own ideas about the way out, but if we are really and truly committed to finding a way out we must be willing to hear the other side’s concerns about our solutions. If violence begets violence and hate begets hate, we will not stop violence by hating the other side for their supposed inaction or overreach. If we want these young men to be in our community instead of disaffection, we need to show them what community looks like. 

We all say we want change, but now's as good a time as any to start putting our money where our mouths are. If we want the violence to stop, perhaps we have to change our approach with young men and what our response is when they reach a breaking point. A house divided cannot stand. 

I hope you enjoyed this post. Thank you, as always, to my friend Clare Ashcraft for edits and insight. To everyone that made it this far, thank you. Stay curious, stay safe, and I’ll see you out there.