The Violent Divide of Politics

A guy in Indianapolis is driving a truck boasting a “Make America Great Again” flag last Tuesday.  A car pulls up alongside; the driver pulls out a handgun and plugs the truck.

A lady in Charlotte, North Carolina wears a Trump t-shirt to a Starbucks.  She’s humiliated by the barista and handed a cup labeled “Build a wall.”

The CEO of Time Warner defends his company’s sponsorship of a presentation of Shakespeare in the Park’s “Julius Caesar” in which a Trump look-alike is assassinated.

Commentator Peggy Noonan says “what we are living through in America is not only a division but a great estrangement.”

Alabama Congressman Steve Scalise recovers in a Washington hospital from a gunshot wound after a psychopathic madman mowed down Republicans practicing for a baseball game to make a political point.

And many are asking, where does this end?  How violent is the political divide going to become?

Gary Polland knows politics.  He served as chairman of the Harris County Republican Party from 1996 to 2002, and publishes a blog called the Texas Conservative Review.  “We have lost the ability to hear differing opinions from our own and be respectful of them,” he tells KTRH News.  “All the ugly rhetoric that’s coming from the Democrats about Trump needs to stop.  Trump won the election.  It’s legitimate.”  But he doesn’t put all of the blame entirely on one side.  “When Barack Obama won and our side was unhappy and there was some ugly rhetoric on our side.  We need to respect the process.”  Polland, like many, points to cable news and mainstream media as an instigator.  “What is absent now, KTRH being an exception, people get their news and information from sources that reinforce their bias and preconceptions, and they don’t hear the other side.


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