Trump shooting shows just how inured and blase we have become to violence, death | Opinion

Death is sacred and terrible, and society must revere it.

On July 13, at a rally in Butler, PA, Donald Trump narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet when he slightly shifted his head, and the racing projectile shaved off, instead, a morsel of ear.

The entirety of the incident lasted mere seconds, with multiple rounds fired. In the end, two others were critically injured and two were dead, the shooter and a man seated in the bleachers.

Watching the incident play out on my television with concurrent commentary and, later, listening to a wide swathe of reactions, I was overwhelmingly struck by the banality with which our society has come to treat death.

Didn’t we once collectively hold our breath, then let out an immense sigh of relief for those death only fleetingly touched? And for the ones caught in death’s full embrace, didn’t we coalesce in mourning?

When JFK was assassinated in 1963, the world “stopped turning.” Whole families, together with neighbors, watched with tear-filled eyes on living room televisions, pedestrians on sidewalks embraced and wept, and car traffic halted, with occupants converging on streets in sorrow.

July 13 saw very little of this heartfelt solidarity.

CNN initially brushed it off as an “incident” in which the former president “fell.”

One witness simply said, “Yeah, I guess some guy in the stands was killed.”

Social media posts expressed disdain at the shooter’s lackluster marksmanship and lamented that it was “so, so close to being the best day ever.”

In Times Square, it was the run-of-the-mill flurry of solipsism as jumbotrons showed the standard frivolous fare — 61 years ago, a behemoth Walter Cronkite would have solemnly recounted for a sea of upturned, riveted eyes the tragic events of that day.

I grieve for all of death’s victims on January 13, those who felt only a glancing chilled finger and those taken into his arms entirely:

Corey Comperatore

David Dutch

James Copenhaver

Donald Trump

Thomas Matthew Crooks

When a society loses its shared deference for death, what becomes of its humanity? Is it not fated to a pitiless future of every man for himself? This is a tomorrow that should kindle fear in us all.

Scott Hammond is a Lexington resident.