It's time to take a break from American lunacy | GARY COSBY JR.

And this is what we have come to in America.

Paul Pelosi, the husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by an intruder in his San Francisco home. The man fractured Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer as he yelled for Nancy Pelosi, who was in Washington, D.C. at the time of the attack.

Earlier this year, U.S. Supreme Court justices had their lives threatened by a man angry over the court considering overturning Roe v. Wade after a document was leaked ahead of the decision. Police arrested a man outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home who was apparently looking to murder him.

And these are only two incidents. Folks, it’s time to turn off the talking idiots on both sides of the political aisle and calm down. I had the unfortunate exposure to a talking head on Fox News who is inflammatory on his best day and, in the same week, I was exposed to two commentators on MSNBC who were so ridiculously biased I thought I might be sick.

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Two exposures to the networks of disinformation in one week was two too many, but many of y’all let this tripe into your homes every single day. Turn these people off. Please. They are fomenting rage in this country that is not only unnecessary, it is becoming criminal. Yeah, they have protected First Amendment speech, but dang, they should have a little responsibility, too.

We have politicians stirring the pot as badly as the political commentators. I don’t remember which Democrat it was during Donald Trump’s presidency who said someone should kill him, but I do remember a lawmaker saying that the president of the United States should be murdered.

Then there were the knuckleheads Trump himself inspired. A bunch of his crazies attempted to “arrest” the governor of Michigan then another, much larger group of people inspired by Trump attempted to overthrow the government to keep their guy in office in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Can we not see what we are doing? Democracy works because people are willing to play the game peacefully. And it is a game, an intra-squad game at that, but that’s what it comes down to. Sometimes our guys score and sometimes their guys score, but in the end we are all in the same country and all citizens together. Good Lord, Alabama and Auburn fans get along better than this.

It is readily apparent to anyone who isn’t continually bombarding his or her mind with the crap on the internet and the talking heads on the networks that America is a really great place filled with wonderful people. Do you know how to mess that up? Yeah, it’s simple. Keep doing what we are doing right now and before you know it, we won’t have a country. We will rip ourselves apart.

Everyone, take a deep breath. The political pendulum swings back and forth. If the Democrats gain ascendancy, don’t get too worked up. That pendulum will swing back to the Republicans pretty quickly. And the converse is also true. No party stays in power long. No party can do too much to ruin the country because we stir things up every two years and generally neuter the party in power by flipping Congress at the midterm elections.

That’s how America works. Now, let’s look back at the Obama presidency for a moment. I didn’t care for Barack Obama’s politics. I thought he was a decent man, but I was happy when his time was up. Obama did not destroy America. Far from it. America grew during his presidency.

As much as I can’t stand Donald Trump, America survived even his tumultuous time in the White House and, if he had been able to tone himself down on Twitter, he would have won reelection without much trouble, but the poor guy just couldn’t find an off switch. Even then, we survived.

And how about Bill Clinton. Man, I really didn’t like Clinton and especially not Hillary Clinton, but not only did we survive, the nation mostly prospered. Same for Ronald Reagan. In fact, as Democrats hated Reagan and his policies, America returned from the brink of international irrelevance to the place of prominent world power under Reagan and the economy grew as well.

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The worst thing that has ever happened to this country is not liberal rule or conservative rule, it is the advent of the 24-hour-a-day news cycle and the invention of social media. Between those two things, there is more absolute nonsense bombarding us every day than at any time in history. If America falls, if Western civilization falls, future historians will point to those two factors at the heart of our ruin.

The fact is, the left is never going to be fully happy with the right and the right is never going to be fully happy with the left. No matter who is in power, we will survive, IF, we are willing to behave like adults. We have a great country. How about we work to keep it that way?

Gary Cosby Jr. is the photo editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: It's time to take a break from American lunacy | GARY COSBY JR.