“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Last night I read a Washington Post article about the funeral of the man who was killed at the Trump rally, Corey Comperatore. Then I began reading the comments, and the comments took me to "X"/Twitter, where I saw post after post with screenshots of his awful tweets and replies. He wished death on liberals, climate change activists, and bicyclists (!). He said that one of Biden's appointees, a black woman, was a "DEI hire." He wanted a civil war. He replied to a post about a bombing of Palestinians with, "They'll get over it. The Japanese did." He posted that he would rather save Putin than people like Biden or Pelosi if they were in a fire. I felt sick as I read these things.
Then I saw video clips that the media hasn't shown, clips that I wish I could unsee and unhear, which showed when he was killed. It was instant. He was hit and immediately slumped over, meaning he probably fell on his family; there was no time to throw his body over them to protect them. Another video clip shows the immediate aftermath. You can hear and see his wife *keening,* her mouth open, as she tries to summon help. It’s primal, beyond words. Heartbreaking, gut-twisting. One of his daughters is there, turned away, sobbing uncontrollably, while a man tries to comfort her. A few minutes later -- but what seems like endless minutes -- a man in a white t-shirt begins administering CPR. Soon he stops, and police and others carry the man away.
I'm trying to put all of this together with this man's hateful, sickening tweets and his support of Trump. His service as a firefighter. His family's and his friends' and his community's praise of him as a good man. Nobody deserves to die because they attended a political rally. No family members should experience the trauma of seeing their beloved father shot and killed.
He was both good, and bad. I don't understand it. I don't think I will ever understand.