I thought my capacity for shock had been completely lost. But reading this message, which went out this morning to all public employees of the State of Virginia, stunned me:

Good morning, State Colleagues: Many of you saw the Proclamation issued by the Governor last night asking Virginians to pause at noon today to reflect and pray for Charlie Kirk’s family, to reject all forms of violence, and for our Commonwealth and Nation to stand together. (You may find the Official Proclamation here.) Just as our Nation joined together after September 11th, so too must we make a similar and lasting commitment to defeat the evils that harm our democracy.

Apparently, I learned on social media, even Williams College, in Massachusetts of all places, has decided to fly its flag at half-staff. Williams College, whose president, Maud Mandel, is on the Professor Watchlist, a blacklisting site designed to purge the academy of liberals and leftists, created by Kirk’s organization.

Over the years, I’ve read countless articles and books about the Redemption period after Reconstruction, how previously reviled and odious figures—slave masters, Confederate politicians, southern generals—were canonized by, first, the white South and ultimately the white power elite of the nation as a whole.

I suddenly have such a visceral sense of what it must have felt like to be a formerly enslaved person, an abolitionist, a Union soldier, the families of Union soldiers who lost their sons or husbands or brothers, a radical founder of the Republican Party, to see this happening. It’s stupefying, shocking, as I said, to see a version of it now, in real time, right before my eyes. It’s like I’m seeing Birth of a Nation getting made right in front of me.

After 9/11, Susan Sontag pleaded to a nation that had completely lost its mind, its sense of reality and proportion, any and every sense of history at all, “let’s not be stupid together.” I know it’s a lot to ask of this country, but, please, let’s not be stupid together.