David French writes in the hours following an assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a political rally in Pennsylvania:

Now is the time for America’s moral center to rise up and declare — with one voice, neither red nor blue — “Enough.” We either recover our sense of decency and basic respect for the humanity of our opponents, or we will see, in Yeats’s words, the “blood-dimmed tide” loosed in our land.

He is referring to a poem by Yeats written in 1919 as Yeats looked over a bleak situation in Ireland, knowing that if a moral center didn’t hold, Ireland, and Europe, would come again to a catastrophic moment (even following the horrors of World War I).

French is appealing to the desperate need to reach back for what we used to value: decency. Somehow, we need to rise up and call for decency and respect in an age where that won’t raise any money and won’t get any “clicks” on social media. Somehow, we need to step up with respect and calm and decency in a culture where our very DNA has violence woven in.

Somehow, in a time where all we do is yell at the “other side” and refuse to acknowledge any other “moral” view other than our own… we need something deeper.

I can’t call this out in Biden or Trump or Schumer or DeSantis or any other “national” leader. This is a time when each of us has agency. Every last one of us can choose how we will respond.

Last night, just hours after the shooting, our new Archbishop for the ACNA posted a call to prayer and a collect for our nation. It wasn’t a dozen comments down… someone calling for a new civil war. We just can’t help ourselves… or can we?

French concludes:

Each of us has our own role to play, in our own circles of influence, either big or small. There has rarely been a better time to love our enemies, to pray for our nation and to remember — during one of the most fraught political campaigns in generations — that each and every one of us is a human being, created in the image of God.

More from French HERE.

This is not a time when we hear someone call for decency and our cynicism remarks: “You first.”

No. It has to be me. It has to be you. We have to be climbing over each other in an effort to outdo one another in love. Be decent… first.