Moral Low Ground

In moments of grief, the country should instinctively lower the temperature. That’s the bare minimum of leadership: acknowledge the pain, respect the dead, and give people space to mourn.

Instead, after the murder of Rob Reiner, we watched politics swallow decency whole. And when leaders respond to tragedy with petty shots and partisan nastiness, it tells everyone downstream that cruelty is acceptable — even rewarded. That’s not just “bad taste.” It’s corrosive. It trains people to treat death like content and suffering like a scoreboard.

This is why society feels like it’s flailing. Leadership isn’t about always being right. It’s about setting a standard. When the tone at the top is contempt, the culture doesn’t stay contained to social media. It leaks into real life: workplaces, schools, families, and neighborhoods. People get quicker to hate, slower to listen, and more willing to dehumanize anyone on the other side. That’s how a country loses its footing — not overnight, but one ugly moment at a time.

And this isn’t about agreeing with Rob Reiner’s politics, Trump’s politics, or anyone’s politics. It’s about a shared minimum standard of behavior. When someone is killed, you don’t smear the victim. You don’t exploit grief. You don’t turn a family’s worst day into a cheap political flex.

Here’s the line we should all be able to agree on: tragedy is not a weapon. Decency is not optional. If we can’t hold that common ground, everything else starts to crack — trust, community, institutions, and the basic feeling that we’re on the same team as humans.

So this is a moment to be unanimous: reject the ugly impulse, call it out when you see it, and demand better from leaders on every side. The floor has to be sanity, empathy, and moral discipline. That’s how you stop the rot.