French: After such violence, our moral centers must hold

By David French / The New York Times

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” William Butler Yeats wrote these words in his poem “The Second Coming” in a different time of violence and fear.

The year was 1919, Europe was still reeling from World War I, a deadly influenza pandemic was sweeping through the world, and the Irish war of independence was underway. Yeats was writing from the heart of a storm, a storm that would grow indescribably worse in 20 short years.

I think of Yeats’ words often. By “center,” he’s referring not to some kind of moderate political middle but rather to the moral center of civilization. When the moral center gives way, nations fall.

I thought of those words again when I saw the blood on Donald Trump’s ear Saturday. Now is the time for America’s moral center to rise up and declare — with one voice, neither red nor blue — “Enough.” We either recover our sense of decency and basic respect for the humanity of our opponents, or we will see, in Yeats’ words, the “blood-dimmed tide” loosed in our land.

The cultural conditions for chaos are created by a lack of courage and character. Yeats lamented that the “best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” And already, we’ve seen the passionate intensity of the worst on display. Members of one extreme faction have claimed the shooting was an elaborate ploy to generate sympathy for Trump. At the same time, members of the opposing extreme faction have attempted to claim that President Joe Biden is responsible for the attack.

How does the center hold? Democrats and independents must stand in solidarity with Republicans, grieving for the dead, praying for the wounded and giving thanks that Trump survived with only a minor wound. Virtually every leading Democrat has condemned the violence with a loud voice, and Biden has both condemned the violence and spoken to Trump directly.

All of this is good and necessary, but it is not sufficient. Each of us has our own role to play, in our own circles of influence, either big or small. There has rarely been a better time to love our enemies, to pray for our nation and to remember — during one of the most fraught political campaigns in generations — that each and every one of us is a human being, created in the image of God.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.