Punch to the chest

The big news about political violence last week was 50 miles to the west of my hometown, but there also was political violence in the scrappy town where I was raised.

The perpetrator in the case in Antioch, Calif., – as described by the victim, who knows his alleged assailant – is a hardcore right-winger and ardent Trump acolyte. The victim was the mayor of Antioch, and the mayor alleged to police that the perpetrator punched him the chest after a political rally.

I know from social media postings from folks I grew up with that there’s political discord in Antioch, much of it focused on the mayor. And while I don’t know if it was a factor in the case, the alleged assailant is White and the assaulted mayor is Black.

Antioch has long been a place where disputes were settled with fists, but not political disputes involving the middle-aged mayor and an even-older assailant.

Fifty or so miles west of Antioch, Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was attacked last week by a hammer-wielding assailant in his San Francisco home and suffered a skull fracture and other injuries. Reports state the attacker was a conspiracy theorist and election-denying extremist who was looking for Nancy Pelosi but instead encountered her husband.

These days we no longer just disagree with the other side in politics. Now we characterize the other side as child molesters, eaters of children’s hearts, communists, fascists, Satan’s disciples. In the eyes of many, opponents are seen as needing violent redress.

Republican Congress members get shot at a softball practice, a deranged man bent on violence tries to break into the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, thousands of insurrectionists violently invade the nation’s capitol in an attempt to overturn the presidential election, Paul Pelosi gets attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant, Antioch’s mayor is punched in the chest by a political opponent. We could go on and on.

I’ve been threatened routinely over the years, but it’s worsened in recent years. I had one person tell me over social media a year and a half ago that my politics were sick and un-American, and that person insisted he, or she, knew where I lived. I used to not take those thinly veiled threats as seriously as I take such threats now. That’s the world we live in.

I was in a diner in Scottsdale, Ariz., a wealthy suburb of Phoenix, the day after the attack on Paul Pelosi. Every customer in the large diner was white. The only people of color were a few employees.

I could feel a palpable anger in that eatery among the diners. Maybe that was because there were hotly contested – more accurately, nastily contested – elections in a week and a half. Maybe it was just me, feeling alienated in a diner with almost no melanin when I am used to being in places like the Imperial Valley and Tucson, where people of color outnumber white folks.

Maybe, though, this is how we will be from now on. A big portion of our country thinks political differences, and political losses, must be dealt with violently.

The violent bent on one side could be lessened if its leader had any inclination to tone things down, but he’s shown no such inclination. As of Monday, four days after the attack on Paul Pelosi, he’d said absolutely nothing about it … and this is a guy who will comment at length on the latest breakup on the “The Bachelor.” For some of his supporters, his lack of condemnation serves as tacit support of the attack.

I’m going to project that the election next week and the subsequent results will be greeted with violence, here in Arizona and beyond.

It is a sad thing that such projections are no longer outrageous but expected.