Like so many millions of my fellow citizens, I watched in horror on Saturday as a would-be assassin came dangerously close to murdering former President Donald Trump. This was not just an attack on him and those innocent people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to attend a political rally. It was not just an attack on the Republican Party.

It was an attack on the very fabric of American democracy.

Political violence has become the norm in our divided and beleaguered country. From the attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 to the shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise in 2017 to the attack on House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, last year to this weekend’s horrific attack that left one of our fellow citizens dead, we are increasingly resolving our differences not with ballots and votes but with bullets and violence.

Neither side can claim the moral high ground in this cold civil war that is now catastrophically approaching boiling point. If only someone would tell that to my Appalachian colleague JD Vance.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the junior senator from Ohio tweeted last night after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “This rhetoric led directly to the attempted assassination of President Trump.”

JD Vance is a Republican. I’m a Democrat. He’s anti-abortion, I’m pro-choice. He supports the MAGA movement, I don’t. He’s now been announced as Trump’s running mate for the 2024 election. I’m a freelance writer and I study Appalachian studies at a small local university. We’re different, he and I.

We’re also incredibly similar. Vance was born in 1984 and grew up in Middletown, Ohio. I was born in 1986 and grew up 30 minutes away from him in Dayton.

His family is from Breathitt County, Kentucky. Mine is from Leslie County, Kentucky, an hour down the road from where I graduated from high school.

We both have Mamaws who have played a formative role in our lives. We are both the first in our families to earn a four-year degree. We are both immensely proud of our Appalachian heritage and Kentucky roots. Vance wrote his book Hillybilly Elegy about them (the premise of which I deeply disagree with, but which resonated with many); I also write often about my own upbringing.

These similarities should far outweigh our differences. If they don’t, something has gone fundamentally wrong.

The first article I wrote for this news publication was almost eight years ago. Donald Trump had just been elected, and I wrote about how I had lost contact with my relatives who had voted for Trump.

I’m talking to them now. In fact, I’ve written about how I was wrong about my initial assumptions. I have friends I love who are Republicans. I have family members who believe homosexuality is a sin. It’s been hard, but I’ve found grace for them because the bonds that bind us and the values ​​we share are greater than the sum of our differences.

Ultimately, we know who we are.

We are Americans. We have never agreed. And it is unlikely that we will ever agree in the future.

I do not write as a journalist, although I am that. I do not write as a democrat, although I am that too. I do not write as a gay man, nor as a socialist – although I am both.

Today I write to you as an American and I simply want to say: This cannot continue.

The motto of my beautiful and beloved home state of Kentucky is, “United we are strong, divided we are weak.” It is a motto we have come to in an honest, if tragic, way.

The Bluegrass State is a national paradox. We are staunch Republicans in national politics, but most often elect a Democratic governor. During the Civil War, we had a star on both flags. Both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born in our Commonwealth. Only one of those presidents survived the war.

I have been a vocal and astute critic of both Donald Trump and JD Vance. But I recognize, as Vance may not, that some of the rhetoric of my fellow Republicans has brought us to this point.

I try to choose my words carefully and sensibly, but I have said things that I regret. I suspect most of you feel the same. Everyone can blame themselves.

Now, however, is not the time to point fingers. Our nation needs to take a deep breath and take a long, hard look in the mirror. Is this really who we are? Are we really who we want to be?

These were precisely the questions President Lincoln pondered in his first inaugural address in 1861. Seven southern states, from the sandy beaches of South Carolina to the arid deserts of West Texas, had seceded from the Union.

By the end of the year, Kentucky had both a Union and a Confederate government. Guerrilla warfare terrorized the people at home. Brother fought brother at Cumberland Gap, at Mill Springs, at Perryville, and at battlefields farther afield that are infamous in our national consciousness: Shiloh, Chickamauga, Gettysburg.

In the face of the disaster, Abraham Lincoln appealed for unity and used his inaugural address as a last attempt to avert civil war. “We are not enemies, but friends,” Lincoln said. “We must not be enemies.”

We must not be enemies.

This is the most dangerous moment our Republic has faced since the fall of Fort Sumter. Tojo may have attacked us at Pearl Harbor, and bin Laden may have destroyed our Twin Towers, but neither poses as great a threat to the survival of this great experiment in self-government as we do at this moment.

“Passion, though it has strained us, must not break our bonds of affection,” continued President Lincoln. “The mystic strings of memory, stretching from every battlefield and every patriot grave to every living heart and hearth in this wide land, will still swell the chorus of the Union when, as they surely will, they are again touched by the better angels of our nature.”

A suffering nation is crying out for politicians who will lead us out of this crisis and not plunge us into a crisis the likes of which has not shaken this continent in over a century and a half.

We cannot be enemies. I am convinced that the American people understand this from the bottom of their hearts. We must get our politicians to catch up.