We know it’s coming.

Not the hour, not the day.

We know there will be more acts of political violence in our beloved country before the fever that grips us breaks, before this awful era ends. If it ever does.

Someone tried to kill President Trump last night. Again.

Within minutes, after we all (I hope) had a moment of shock and dismay, millions of us immediately launched into the same performative posting and hollering and rage, circling the same same arguments, crying out into the national cacophony our same small certainties.

Things fall apart.

The rough beast that lurks in the shadows of our days now slouches toward us, and we pretend we don’t see it in the lobby, in the ballroom, at the checkpoint where a man with weapons runs past the metal detectors.

We have made a religion of our grievances, our unrelenting angers. The shooters, the assassins, the online hate-mobs, the gleeful vandals of decency and stability—they are all the products of those angers. History teaches us many things, and one of its abiding lessons is that vulnerable minds always find their god in the fury of their times.

And we wonder why they shoot.

But we don’t wonder. We know. We’re just too broken to say it aloud.

It is not random violence. What we are experiencing is the inevitable spiritual consequence of a society that has made politics into a kind of religion.

When a shared and stable understanding of basic facts and their meaning collapses—when shared civic truth dies—vulnerable minds become dangerous. They fill the void with visions.

The historical analogies are abundant. Weimar, obviously. The French Revolution’s Terror phase. The sectarian violence of the English Civil War. America in the 1960s. Charles Manson wasn’t political, but he sensed the breakdown in the country and became possessed by his own apocalyptic understanding of it. Helter skelter.

We are a deeply broken society spiritually, and thus mentally. The terror of this truth—the cold reality—is that we know. We all sense it. But we keep performing these exhausting rituals of denial instead of naming it.

And there’s a point where you can’t heal this.

I’m a hopeful person by nature. But it feels to me sometimes, in my darker moments, as if our beloved America is in the agonizing process of committing civic suicide.

There is one poem for this moment.

—Terry

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedTurning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?