A Shooting Changes a Family. And It Can Change a Nation.
On March 30, 1981, I was sitting in my therapist’s office when one of my Secret Service agents burst through the door. At first I was angry, thinking, “Now they’re intruding on my therapy sessions?” But then I saw how pale his face was. He said, “Patti, there’s been a shooting.”
The day was one of the longest of my life. I didn’t know if my father, Ronald Reagan, would live, and I found out later that the doctors searching for bullet fragments in his chest didn’t know, either. There was a long flight on an Army transport plane, arriving in Washington, D.C., a few hours before dawn; there was my mother sleeping with one of my father’s shirts pressed to her face to breathe in his scent; there was my father pale, fragile in a hospital bed, his eyes here but also far away. And there was the stunned mood of the country over the days that followed — strangers coming up to me gently, compassionately. Politics became irrelevant, at least for a while.
I don’t know where Donald Trump’s family members were when bullets were fired at his Pennsylvania rally, injuring him, killing one attendee and seriously injuring two others. I think I do know the shock that they’re feeling. For all of the apparatus around a president or a presidential candidate, for all the planning, the security, it still comes down to this: They are flesh and blood, they are human beings just like the rest of us, and their lives can change in a split second. It takes only one bullet to bring that fact home.
America is far more angry and far more violent now than it was in 1981. I don’t know if this event will soften any of that. I don’t know if the Trump family will have the same experience I did — that of a nation setting politics aside and simply responding in a human and humane way. I also don’t know how, or if, this experience will change Mr. Trump. My father believed that God spared him for a very specific reason, to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union, to try to reach some kind of agreement on nuclear weapons. It’s possible that what he and Mikhail Gorbachev achieved might not have happened had he not been shot. That’s the other part of being reminded of your fragility as a human being: You are reminded that time is precious and it’s imperative to use its gift in the most meaningful way you can. But how any individual interprets that realization is impossible to predict.
Having a loved one shot changes you, regardless of whether that loved one is famous. It unravels you in the first horrible, chaotic moments, and it rearranges you in the days and years afterward. The event on Saturday should also change us as a country, shock us into remembering who we are supposed to be, who we are capable of being: not people riddled with rage and reaching for weapons, not people who try to influence elections with gunfire. I long for the America that wrapped itself around my family after my father was shot, and I pray we can find that in ourselves again.
