As the lights went out on 2024, we lost one of our longest-lasting beacons of peace, only to be replaced by the blood-red dawn of 2025, and the violence that has now become a hallmark of America.
It is both sad and incredible that 100-year-old Jimmy Carter’s death was actually more surprising than the hell that visited New Orleans but three days later.
You can always count on violence, and plenty of it, in the United States of America.
There was absolutely no reason to believe the terrible carnage that resulted in the deaths of 15 people in New Orleans, and wrecked the futures of countless others wouldn’t blast its way onto the scene of some American city or town, because violence has become the blaring background music of a nation under constant threat from its own.
I bet most of you didn't hear about the mass-shooting in a Jamaica, Queens, nightclub in New York City that wounded 10 people at approximately the same time New Orlean’s French Quarter was under siege.
Who can keep up with it all?
Nobody — not you, not me, not that precious child sitting at her desk — is safe in our country anymore, because rather than really deal with the underlying causes and gruesome effects of our extreme sickness, we’d rather point fingers at the faceless bogeymen who wait at our borders.
Look, there are more guns than people in America — 500 million, give or take — and the fact that I can type that so casually just to be read with a knowing shrug, should show us just how far our sickness has progressed.
But rather than dealing with all that unchecked weaponry, Republicans are telling us that immigration is to blame for most of our societal ills. It has gotten so bad, they say, that nameless immigrants are actually walking into our backyards and eating our pets while we sleep.
Meantime, in the real world, our children are being mowed down in schools by their fellow Americans.
The fact is this: We value guns more than children, and if you want to somehow try to dispute that, please get help immediately, because your lights are going out.
The monster who careened into New Orleans was no immigrant who had just crossed the border, because, again, it almost never is. No, this guy was very much an American citizen and an Army vet, who served our country in Afghanistan.
He is just another American who was radicalized by whatever aligned with what was eating him alive on the inside, and became afflicted with the same sickness that has overcome thousands of Americans before him in this carefully cured environment of extreme violence we’ve cooked up in this country.
Rather than get help for his disorder, he got weapons.
The American Way right there …
Of course this didn’t stop America’s most notorious homegrown terrorist leader, Donald J. Trump, from spewing his noxious gas on his social media channel Thursday morning, as the facts of what happened were only beginning to roll in:
"With the Biden 'Open Border’s Policy' I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER. What he and his group of Election Interfering 'thugs' have done to our Country will not soon be forgotten! MAGA"
And before moving on let’s take a look at that response from the soon-to-be leader of the free world. THIS is who millions of Americans decided had the temperament to lead us into the future.
Don’t go telling me the inmate isn’t running our asylum.
The brutal truth is that the America-attacking Trump loves this terror. It gives him air and life. You see, without the violence and carnage lowlifes like Trump couldn’t exist. It drives his sickening narrative that only he can stop the terror from growing that he himself so carefully nurtures.
He is the arsonist telling the burn victims that he’s the man to extinguish all those fires that he carefully douses with gasoline.
And say what you want about the America-attacker, please, but give him this: he knows full well what kind of homegrown bilge attacks America. Many happen to be the spit and dirt that combine to makeup the mud that helps form his rancid base.
They are the rudderless groupies who he orders “to stand back and stand by.”
Four years ago Monday, thousands of them descended on our Capitol at his request and exacted unspeakable violence during America’s once-sacred transfer of power.
His vice president was threatened with hanging, lawmakers ran for their lives, and overmatched law enforcement officers were beaten to a pulp.
All this during a day that used to proudly mark America’s place as the world’s most enduring democracy.
Are you reading this????
As of this writing, 1,561 Americans have been charged criminally in federal court for that terrible attack.
Take the case of just one of these monsters, David Dempsey. According to prosecutors:
"Though Dempsey has pled guilty only for his assaults on Detective Nguyen and Sergeant Mastony, his violent assault on other officers defending the Capitol was relentless: swinging pole-like weapons more than 20 times, spraying chemical agents at least three times, hurling objects at officers at least ten times, stomping on the heads of police officers as he perched above them five times, attempting to steal a riot shield and baton, and incessantly hurling threats and insults at police while rallying other rioters to join his onslaught."
This is one of the guys who the America-attacking Trump said “he loved” when he finally called off the attempted coup in which countless law enforcement officers were beaten and $2.8 million worth of damage was inflicted on OUR Capitol.
Trump himself skated free of course, which is the source of endless angst and frustration on this side of the keyboard, but the sane among us — hundreds of millions of people around the world — saw and heard it all play out on that gruesome day.
You don’t need people like me to tell people like you how dangerous things are in America right now, or to point out the jagged symmetry of a man of peace like Carter exiting the scene, while a man of violence like Trump enters it.
I do, however, believe people like us are needed to scream louder than ever before that.
NOW READ: Are you still wondering why workers voted for Trump?
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.