At dinner in Baltimore’s Little Italy, where Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi grew up, someone expressed shock and disgust at the attack on Pelosi’s husband at the couple’s home in San Francisco. I shared the disgust, but not so much the shock.
Everyone at the table had been alive at the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Nov. 22, 1963); we remember the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy and John Lennon, the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.
The shocks of history should have made us a less violent country. Instead, we’ve become more so. We’ve had thousands of mass shootings by now and, in Baltimore, almost daily homicides over the last seven years.
