Just over three years ago, my brother, aged 51, took his life with a gun. As I understand from close relatives, in the aftermath local authorities conducted an investigation that included a search of his home where guns were confiscated. “How many?”, I asked sometime later. “A lot of guns”, was the quiet answer.
To backtrack a bit, while my brother and I shared our growing up years, our adult lives looked very different from one another. After completing college in a small town in the northeastern mountains of Pennsylvania, my brother settled down back in the small, rural community where my parents still lived. The community in central Pennsylvania was once home to the steel industry and is easily as politically conservative as one thinks of when we think of politics in the southern United States in the 2020s where it so happens I currently live. In contrast, I’d attended a large university in a metropolitan area and then moved to Washington, DC to begin my career and where I lived for several years before returning to the city where I’d attended college until I eventually moved south. I’d also had a brief stint living in Philadelphia, PA attending another large university.
Our parents were my dad on one hand, whose grandparents immigrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century and whose own father and grandfather were blue collar industry workers, who was long a union supporter and always a “Made in America” champion, so he leaned politically more liberal. My mom, who grew up on the Midwestern plains of Kansas, by contrast, came from a politically conservative family. I figured we stood a 50/50 chance of adopting either leaning, circumstances depending.
Conversations with my brother, whom I mostly saw at the holidays, could be tense if he brought up politics. One holiday stands out as he ranted at me for an extended period as other relatives looked on. I couldn’t glean from his rant that it was any specific matter of policy or even ideology with which he strongly disagreed with me but more a generalized sense of anger over my supposed liberal leaning, what we in Braver Angels call affective polarization.
In the aftermath of his suicide, I wondered whether his politics were behind his seeming need to stockpile guns in his home that had made them an easy reach when he experienced some major depression.
Fast-forward to 2024, and I’m scrolling through my social media to see that someone I knew from childhood had died with a post from his sibling that reads “RIP (name). I hope you find more happiness in the next life than you did in this one.” The deceased, whom I’ll call Greg, and I had many exchanges via social media sometime around the 2016 election. Greg clearly leaned on the political left, and he was clearly very angered over its outcome but also over many of the same things we often read the left is concerned about. As more of a pragmatic centrist who often sees multiple sides of any issue and as someone who had read several books trying to understand the right’s anger, I tried to offer him a different perspective or a way to see where “the other side” was coming from. Suffice it to say, he wasn’t having it and eventually one or both of us decided to drop the conversation. While we remained friends on social media, we’d had no interaction for several years.
When I learned of his death, I was curious. What had he been posting on social media in recent times? His most recent post reads in part “Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous . . . And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, f*** them. Make it personal.” Wow, just wow.
While I’m sure Greg had other factors at play operating in the background, had politics helped lead to his death? I wondered.
This week, scrolling through my social media feed, I see another man I know from childhood posting angry rants with memes and pictures which seemingly promote violence to take back what some in the U.S. see as their way of life going away. Is he intending to promote civil war as an answer to our current culture and political problems? I wondered. Where will it lead?
I currently serve as a state coordinator for Braver Angels in South Carolina. I’ve been involved with Braver Angels (originally Better Angels) since its founding in 2017. What drew me to this work was the dawning recognition that trouble had apparently been brewing for years while many of us were oblivious to it and a recognition that we needed some serious repair work if our democracy/republic is to continue standing.
This past week, I learned of a friend of a friend’s friend, also 51, who took his own life. And while I can have no idea whether politics played any role in his case and taking the poor state of our system for dealing with mental illness into account, I am beleaguered by the number of suicides, particularly among middle-aged men, which I continue to learn of.
We need to figure this out. Politics at its heart is how we organize ourselves to live in a civil society. Our politics should not be killing us. Consider this a wake-up call to lay down our arms, so to speak, and continue in this most important of work.
