Looking back at my recent columns, I was taken aback at how many were about the pandemic that has controlled our lives since March. I’m not alone. This has been an ongoing focus and agony, as has the question for everyone: When will we get back to normal?

That question gave me pause, knowing we look ahead with rose-colored glasses. Would “normal” be good?

I recall a piece from March by Neil Patel, co-founder of the Daily Caller, titled “Let’s Take a Break from Politicizing Everything.” The nation had soared to 28,000 deaths from covid-19. (We’re now over 120,000.) He urged a calming of rhetoric, noting “we will have plenty of time to rip each other to pieces over politics” in months ahead, especially with the November election. “Take a break,” pleaded Patel. “Take a breath. Your friends and neighbors will appreciate it, and there are definitely more important things to think about right now.”

Well, it’s late June, and things seem back to normal: Politics is poisonous. The streets are rioting. Racial tensions are awful. The culture is in chaos. Public discourse is vicious.

Yep, back to normal.

Personally, I went through a nasty situation the last couple weeks. Remember the piece I wrote in October 2018 on the Tree of Life synagogue tragedy? It was an emotional column where I recounted the trauma of my daughters and friends hiding in a van outside the synagogue while an evil man was brutally murdering our beloved Jewish brothers and sisters inside their place of worship. Many of you emailed about how it touched you.

Well, apparently not everyone was so enamored. Two Grove City College alumni cited it in a petition letter to the president of Grove City College urging me to step down from my position at the Institute for Faith & Freedom. They said the piece constituted “white nationalist rhetoric.” “Kengor wrote a very strange, troubling piece about the Tree of Life shooting,” averred one of my accusers. “He focuses on how his children were nearby when it happened, which centers his family as a victim of the shooter. He refuses to identify the shooter as a racist/white nationalist/anti-Semitic. Instead, he talks about the shooting as an act of God.” He said I had “reframed the white nationalist massacre as a Christian event with Christian victims.”

When I read that assessment, I was bewildered, I was aghast, I was speechless. (Please read it for yourself.) When my wife read it, she cried. My oldest daughter, the one I described jumping the fence escaping from the shooting, cried. We were shocked at how anyone could have such a cruel interpretation.

After a firestorm of outrage from alumni, current students, and faculty — and three national media stories — the petition authors retracted and apologized, directing themselves instead at the college at large. Never mind!

The attack was hurtful to my family, but at a deeper level, it’s symptomatic of how toxic the public square has become. Even after a time of national pandemic and shared suffering, we’re right back at each other’s throats.

To quote Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?” Yes, please.

If this is back to normal, then take me back to the shutdown. I’ll go back to my kids and my chickens and walking around the woods. Life was more peaceful.

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