Comment: What attack on a senior, derision that followed says

Published 1:30 am Friday, November 4, 2022

By Robin Givhan / The Washington Post

Of all the charges filed against the man who is accused of breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and fracturing her husband Paul’s skull with a hammer, the one that is the most jarring is elder abuse.

It isn’t the most serious of the charges, which also include attempted murder and several federal crimes. But it reflects the continued chipping away at the country’s moral center. It underscores the degree to which society has lost its way. Someone broke into the home of an 82-year-old grandfather and bashed him in the head with a hammer. When you strip away the political bickering, the conspiracy theories and the disinformation campaigns, this is what the country is left with. One might be inclined to call what happened heartbreaking, but our hearts are already broken into a million tiny bits after the mass shootings, the antisemitism, the anti-Asian violence, the police malfeasance that sparked Black Lives Matter protests. Are there any pieces still big enough to crack?

The particular protections given the elderly under California law reflect the eventual human condition with which everyone must contend. We become increasingly fragile as we age. Older people often don’t keep up with changes in technology and so can be targeted for digitized financial crimes. They may be infirm and unable to fully care for themselves and so have to rely on someone else for their most basic needs. The lucky might just need a helping hand to help keep life going along smoothly. But fundamentally, the criminalization of the mistreatment of seniors is a plea to treat them with dignity and respect. Elders deserve both. A decent society owes them that.

The attack on Pelosi graphically highlights just how indecent this country has become.

The reactions to the Pelosi attack have mostly been assessed within the framework of politics. President Biden called the assault “despicable,” and added, “There’s too much violence; political violence, too much hatred, too much vitriol.” Some Republicans denounced the assault but then quickly noted that Democrats share responsibility for politically motivated trauma. Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, called the suspect David DePape, 42, a “deranged individual,” as if people who do terrible things can’t also be sane, methodical and thoughtful. DePape, law enforcement has said, arrived at the Pelosi home with a backpack containing a hammer, tape, gloves, zip ties and rope. That’s a fairly considered collection of tools and implements.

The current state of politics has made it easy to forget about the humans behind the rhetoric. The demonizing of members of the opposing party has been going on for a long time and in 2017, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., was shot and seriously injured during practice for a Congressional Baseball Game. Political violence runs deep in this country’s history with assassinations and assassination attempts. And Jan. 6 was not only an assault on democracy but also a violent hunt for certain lawmakers, notably Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence.

But the attack on Paul Pelosi stands apart because he isn’t an elected official, someone running for office or even a denizen of the so-called swamp. He’s a wealthy guy who lives in San Francisco. He’s famous by marriage and so the public knows all about his DUI arrest in May. He’s been married for 59 years. He cuts a striking figure in a tuxedo when he accompanies his wife to the Kennedy Center or a state dinner. And he’s a senior citizen, which should count for some thing. At minimum, it should mean that his violent assault doesn’t become the punchline of jokes by Republican politicians. It should mean that his being knocked unconscious during a home invasion isn’t glossed over on the way to a talking point about gun rights or urban crime rates or criminal justice reform.

The suspect in this break-in and attack seemed callously clear about his intent. According to law enforcement, he demanded to know the whereabouts of the speaker and then declared himself prepared to wait patiently for her return so he could break her kneecaps. He appeared to know precisely what he was doing, but what are we doing as a society?

It’s important to consider the kind of security that’s afforded lawmakers who are regularly threatened and what those threats mean to members of their family. It’s necessary to try to mediate political differences instead of creating demons out of those who hold other views. But if it is possible to jettison the politics and simply consider the person — this gray-haired man awakened in the wee hours of the morning by an attacker — it might do a world of good for our humanity. For our frayed, threadbare humanity.

It’s been clear that assaults on the youngest members of society have done little to motivate some officeholders and citizens to take action on gun control to make the culture less violent. People respond to the shooting of elementary schoolchildren as a kind of acceptable mayhem to ensure that the right to gun ownership remains inviolate. Thoughts and prayers go out to the parents and siblings and other family members. The tiniest bit of legislative progress on gun control took three decades and occurred after a long list of mass shootings including Sandy Hook, Parkland and Uvalde.

And now, the country’s vitriolic politics and hateful division has brought us to this 82-year-old man. No life is inherently more valuable than another, but certain people’s lives are more fragile. They are more vulnerable. They are not as strong as those in the prime of their lives. And so just as our stubborn unwillingness to do more to protect children from violence speaks to the kind of society that we have built, so does our response to this attack on a senior citizen, allegedly by a suspect espousing hate. The political misdirection in the face of an elder who was sent to the hospital with a fractured skull isn’t just a reminder of how terrible the country’s politics have become. It’s also an indictment of how soulless so many of its people have decided to be.

Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press. Follow her on Twitter @RobinGivhan.