Close to Home

This is an editorial, but the Editorial Board has given me the chance to write a personal message, one that we all endorse but filtered through my personal experience.

You see, Butler, Pennsylvania, is my hometown — near enough, at least, that my high school years were spent in a house just 10 miles from the Big Butler Fairgrounds, where I attended the annual fair there, and the frequent Jaycees’ haunted houses around Halloween, which I once believed were the most terrifying thing that could be experienced on that site.

I had a couple of old friends in that crowd on Saturday, all of whom were, thankfully, unharmed, but tell harrowing stories. When I looked around on my television screen that evening, I saw familiar faces — not faces I actually knew, but of people who were once my neighbors, or are descended from those families, or resemble them enough to feel recognizable. I felt it in my bones.

I am not a supporter of Donald Trump. I will not vote for him in November. Until Saturday, when I viewed a Trump rally from afar, it truly felt distant to me, almost foreign, a gathering of complete strangers because of our political differences.

That thin veneer evaporated on Saturday. I saw people — and I was scared for them, all of them, and wanted them all to be safe.

That includes Donald Trump. A few people, predictably, rushed to social media to make off-color jokes in the seemingly constant contest to see who can be the most “clever,” in the most offensive way. But I think my response was not unusual: I was grateful that the former president was not more seriously harmed by a would-be assassin’s bullet.

And I’m devastated that three others were, including 50-year-old firefighter Corey Comperatore from nearby Sarver, a tiny neighborhood that nobody outside my childhood space has heard of but I know well. His death, while protecting his family from harm, is the worst kind of tragedy, and in death he’s the best kind of hero.

Like the rest of the nation, I’ve been struggling to make sense of what happened on Saturday in Butler, which now has an infamy it really doesn’t deserve; the shooter actually came from a suburban Pittsburgh community, which I also know well, more than an hour away. Butler, like so many places, did nothing to get this black mark. It is, in fact, a Republican enclave, a mostly rural community not far from Pittsburgh, unfailingly conservative and overwhelmingly Trump-friendly.

One repeated message we’ve heard since Saturday: Political violence has no place in America. And, no question, it needs to be said over and over again, though it rings hollow — because violence is so common in this complicated country. Political leaders across the spectrum, from the Kennedys to George Wallace, have been targeted. The past few years — it must be said, in no small part because of Donald Trump and his own bombastic rhetoric — have been caustic and occasionally violent. Eruptions of violence are shocking but not surprising.

Some are suggesting that this political climate produced the horrific act on Saturday. But, in the days hence, there’s little evidence of the 20-year-old shooter’s politics or motive. It’s just as likely to have been mental illness or personal demons that drove him. Correlation doesn’t imply causation.

Still, there is a lesson to take away from this, and it is an opportunity for American citizens, all ages and on every side of the political debate, to bring about change that truly matters.

This attempted assassination of a political candidate really hit close to home for me — because it was close to my actual home, the place I come from, the people who surrounded me in my formative years. I know them to be good people, kind and generous people. My friends who were in the crowd talked about how orderly it dispersed after the echoes of gunshots died down, how people stopped to help others, and there was no pushing or shoving — something I noticed while watching the ubiquitous coverage on Saturday evening.

It’s a prism that has given me pause, and raised questions. How do we disagree politically without it curdling into something ugly? It’s an election with high stakes, and both sides see it as potentially ruinous if the other side wins: Can we passionately fight that battle without it turning personal, and violent? Can we trust democracy to outlive challenges that sometimes feel existential?

How can we stop seeing each other as enemies, even as we strongly disagree?

One way, one awful way, is to see past the politics and simply see neighbors covered in blood, cowering in fear as gunfire erupts around them, to see frightened faces instead of the red caps and shirts. Let me tell you, it pretty quickly makes everything else seem inconsequential. They are me. I am them. Politics be damned.

I’ve seen my hometown under fire. I’ve seen violence surrounding politics terrorize people I grew up with. I’m here to tell you: It changed me.

I hope it changes others, without them having to experience horror so close to home.

— Joseph Shaw, executive editor