From Christine Flowers: 'This One Is Different'

 From Christine Flowers, via facebook:

I’ve been commenting a great deal since Charlie Kirk was assassinated last Wednesday. But I’ve also been observing, taking notes. Digesting. I feel in a way like a foreigner traveling through a foreign country, a stranger absorbing customs that shock but fascinate me. I’m a bit like DeTocqueville with she/her pronouns. The custom that interests me the most is how these separate Americas and vastly different Americans react to death.

Some mourn, deeply, as if they lost a brother. Some mourn but make excuses in an honest way, lamenting the fact that tragedy repeats itself over and overer again. Some do not mourn at all. Some celebrate. And the people who love them make excuses to deflect from their profound and obvious inhumanity.

If I truly were an objective observer like DeTocqueville, though, I’d notice something else. The air has changed. There is an electricity that was heretofore dormant, but is now a current coursing through the sort of people who before, would have sought to ignore the base cruelty of other Americans in that other America.

It is to be expected that conservatives and self -defined right wingers would be galvanized by such a cruel attack on a young father, a man whose only offense, if you could call it that, was using words that challenged the ubiquitous rainbow and questioned the power of tolerance.

But it’s not just the right that is standing up, ear tipped to hear a message on the wind: unite. That message is filtering down to those who heretofore had no ideology other than a desire to be decent and untroubled. Now, however, they saw the way that other Americans in that other America callously mixed “I told you so” into their insincere messages of condolence and sorrow. And they are appalled. Sam Cooke sang about a change coming. From what I’ve seen, the change is here. In death, prophets speak with the power of clarion bells. Things have shifted. This one is different.