Coming Apart at the Seams

 In the last couple of weeks in my country, these things have happened:

An ex-marine veteran of the 2003 Iraq war drove his pickup truck into a church building and started firing, then set fire to the place, killing two and injuring 8 others.

Another ex-marine veteran of the 2003 Iraq war drove his boat up to the dock of a waterside restaurant on the coast of North Carolina and started firing, killing three and injuring 7 others.

An illegal immigrant working at a Dallas hotel attacked his boss with a machete, decapitating him in front of members of his family, then kicked his head like a soccer ball across the parking lot.

Closer to home a man was killed on interstate 288 in a road rage incident, where a shooting caused the truck the victim was driving to burst into flames.

In a separate road rage incident, a young man was shot at nine times on Midlothian Turnpike by another driver, one of the bullets going through his knee. The victim in this case was the boyfriend of my niece. The shooter was sent into this unhinged rage because he got cut off.

At the Ryder Cup, the MC of the event introducing one of the competitors for the European team led the assembled crowd in a rousing chant of F**K YOU, RORY!!! The “comedian” who the event hired to handle the player introductions was dismissed from her job and forced to apologize to Rory McElroy and the entire European team, but not before she embarrassed herself and every decent American unlucky enough to hear her epic display of rudeness.

Yes, I know that these incidents are not equally egregious. But all of them seem emblematic of what my country is becoming—a place where people are losing their minds. If you’re keeping score at home, we’ve now had 324 mass shootings this year alone. Road rage is becoming so prevalent, it has actually changed the way I drive on the interstates. My son recently told me that when he gets on an interstate in Nashville he starts from the assumption that every vehicle on the highway is driven by someone with a firearm and a hair trigger. Instead of paranoia, this sounds like a perfectly reasonable strategy.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that our society is coming apart at the seams. Our Lord tells us to not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good. 

But, how???