A ball-capped and scraggly-bearded young white man shouts outside a Donald Trump rally in Cleveland that black protesters ought to go back to Africa.
Then Trump tells his large and rowdy crowd to fight back against disruptive protesters, rather than rise above them.
Thus we observe a state of American politics that has devolved from dysfunctional and angry to ugly and primitive and openly racist and violent.
Ours is a suddenly accelerated descent from decency. It compels the thoughtfully introspective among us to think and behave less rigidly, less predictably, less contemptuously, less derisively, less self-servingly, more tolerantly and more inclusively.
That is to say that the decent must unite for decency.
My thoughts turn to Dale Bumpers and, then, to John Kasich.
I have an essay in the current Talk Business and Politics magazine that remembers the transformative 1970s in Arkansas politics. The decade began with the from-nowhere gubernatorial candidacy of a young modernizing progressive named Bumpers.
The article recounts that leading liberals in Little Rock told Bumpers they wouldn't support him in the multi-candidate preferential Democratic primary unless he assailed the regressive policies and machine politics of the former governor, Orval Faubus. And Bumpers steadfastly would not do it.
Instead he ran a strictly positive campaign about the nobility of public service. He squeezed, ever so narrowly, into a fateful runoff that changed Arkansas history.
On the morning after Bumpers made that runoff, a liberal lioness of Little Rock, who previously had rejected Bumpers' positivity and supported someone else, showed up at Bumpers' headquarters to say, OK, I'm with you now, we'll do it your way.
That brings me to Kasich, which is not to intimate that he possesses the natural charismatic appeal, or the eloquence, or the progressivism, of the late Bumpers. But Kasich has run a decidedly positive and thus unique presidential campaign. He has displayed social tolerance and a compassionate manner that I recommend as newly essential in this incendiary time and context.
Kasich wants to cut taxes and suspend business regulation. Those are policies I vigorously oppose. But I can't make myself mad at him for them.
He opposes a woman's right to choose abortion, and, as president, could appoint a Supreme Court justice or three to imperil and perhaps even destroy that right. But I still can't make myself mad at him.
That's because he is tolerant, undogmatic and anecdotally engaging and empathic in his style and on many social issues.
On Saturday one of the Trump-obsessed cable television channels was showing, as usual, a hate-filled Trump rally. Suddenly it switched to a split screen to display Kasich hugging a man at a town-hall meeting--a man whose challenges as expressed in a question presumably had moved the candidate.
So the network switched full-screen to Kasich's event. It was as if CBS had re-programmed from an Auburn-Alabama football game to a spelling bee.
Soon Kasich was talking about his grandfather getting cheated by coal companies and winding up with black lung disease, and about his own father carrying mail and cheering his own kids at high school football games and dance recitals.
Then Kasich went from preaching to meddling, as a good preacher always will. He declared that pundits need to come down from their easy and comfortable critique 50 rows up in the grandstand to join him in the actual arena.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson tells a story about Kasich that I can no longer resist sharing.
Shortly after his election, Asa attended a Republican governors' conference and, as a newly elected state chief executive, was asked to introduce himself. With Kasich in the room as the GOP governor of Ohio, Asa said, among other things, that he would be confronted instantly at home with a quarter-million people in possession of new health insurance and a legislative contingent in his own party that wanted to take that insurance away.
On the next Sunday, Asa's phone rang. Kasich was calling.
The Ohioan told the Arkansan that he'd just heard a good sermon that had turned his thoughts to Asa and those quarter-million people. Don't let their insurance get taken away, Kasich implored.
Now the republic may be at such risk that the reasonable and fair-minded among us have no option but to put decency even ahead of partisanship, ideology and self-interest.
We need to rally to the kind of human being that Kasich seems to be.
I'm not so sure that, if given the power to pick the president from the remaining slate, I wouldn't hang up between Kasich and Hillary Clinton.
She would save the Supreme Court. But he might help us restore an effective political center. And he might bolster American generosity and humanity, which, I fear, will be in deep disrepair after this election when all the haters and intolerants don't get their way, as they won't, as they mustn't.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/15/2016