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VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

We are living in crazy times…

How crazy? Well, for the second time in as many months, someone tried to (or planned to) assassinate Donald Trump, a former president of the United States and current candidate for the Republican Party — and it wasn’t really evan treated like that big of a deal.

Oh, the first attempted assassination? That was a huge deal.

But this past time, it didn’t really last all that long in the news cycle before we were off on P. Diddy’s sex trafficking charges and exploding pagers in teh Middle East. It’s like we’ve just come to accept things, no matter how nutso they are, and just kind of shrug and move on with our lives.

How crazy? Well, there was a mass shooting at a school. Wait… let me clarify. There was yet another mass shooting at another

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school, this one in Georgia.

Four people (two students and two teachers) were killed and nine others were wounded.

The shooter? A 14-year-old boy. It was the 35th school shooting of 2024, which sounds horrifying (which it is) but that number is actually way down from the 82 such incidents of violence in 2023.

And yet, there’s very little actually being said about it. Are we just out of hope that there might be a solution to this gun violence? Are we just relieved it’s “over there” and not here where we live? Do we feel too helpless to take any kind of action?

Or have we just become too desensitized to care? Are our sympathy and empathy and outrage and compassion reserves just too depleted to even react to another needless violent act of a mentally disturbed person that results in the deaths of children and innocent people?

Back when COVID-19 was raging in 2020, we kept hearing about how we are “living in unprecedented times.” And it was certainly a perfect storm of pandemic and economic collapse and racial tensions and social unrest and politicizing of everything from medicine to gender to vaccines.

At one point, my son said to me, “I want to go back to living in precedented times.” We eventually got past the coronavirus — kinda, sorta. It’s still around and there are people right here in this community who have it as we sit here, but again, we’ve just kind of decided to shrug and get on with our lives.

We were OK with going along to get along four years ago (except for you folks who wore your masks as a chin diaper — you know who you are). But eventually, trying to keep people from getting sick and dying began to interfere too much with our plans, our vacations, our ballgames, our family get-togethers, and such, so we slowly began rolling back restrictions and regulations until things were “back to normal” — or at least the “new” normal.

And that’s were we are with just about everything. It’s now “normal” that presidential candidates get shot at, that we have to fact-check our elected leaders, that we have violence in our schools, that it costs in a week to feed our families what it used to cost for a month’s worth of groceries, where a man who wants to be leader of the free world is tweeting, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.”

The new normal isn’t normal.