It’s up to the rest of us to change

What a horrible week.

Pipe bombs mailed to political leaders. Murders in Kentucky driven by race. Then a massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

America’s political environment has become poisonous, and the peddlers of poison continue to find a market for their toxic brew of hate, conspiracy theories and falsehood.

None of this is new, unfortunately. And it’s not unique to America.

It served the interest of the Russian tsar in the 19th century to have his secret police create “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” out of whole cloth in order to scapegoat his country’s Jews. Pogroms followed, their violence a distraction and an outlet for public anger and frustration.

And while the tsar is long gone, “The Protocols” live on in the twisted doctrine of anti-Semites across the globe.

Racial hatred has been endemic for centuries, pre-dating this country’s disastrous and shameful experience with slavery.

So it’s not new, and it’s not limited to the country we call home.

But it’s boiling at fever pitch, and the country we call home is at risk of losing its way. 

Our core principles, our core values are endangered when assassination attempts replace debate, when murder of our fellow citizens is deemed a worthy political statement.

The poison peddlers are at least partly to blame. 

They find a ready audience in folks who are lost or misguided or troubled, folks who can’t seem to cope with their own failure to find a place in the world.

In a better world, this nation’s leaders would come together — making “unity” more than a buzzword — to transform the political environment, calling the poison peddlers to account.

Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in.

Instead, from the president we get little more than a shrug and the notion that such violence is “unimaginable.” Sorry, Mr. President, it’s not only “imaginable,” it is an everyday reality.

Faced with that reality and with an absence of leadership at the top, it’s up to the rest of us. 

It’s up to all of us. 

It is our individual responsibility whenever we encounter bigotry or anti-Semitism or threats of political violence, to speak up, to say in no uncertain words that America is better than that. 

It has to be better than that if we are to survive as a nation.

It’s up to us. — J.R.