The donkey and the elephant. I'm not sure either animal still exists in any form I recognize.

What replaced them nobody has named yet.

From the Author of The Long View From 1964

The Second Amendment was never about Vinney the desperado riding into town looking for a fight. It was never about bravado or immunity or masks or the performance of toughness by people who have never actually been tested.

But we have already established in this country that fair elections and accepted elections are not always the same thing.

I have a sinking feeling we will find ourselves watching Second String Donny screaming foul again. Not just about the midterms. About the $1.776 billion that was stolen from his patriots along with everything else.

So yes. You have to make mistakes to learn. You have to touch something hot to understand burns. You have to get things wrong before you understand what right costs.

But the secret — the thing the scars actually teach you if you pay attention — is to get a small burn and learn your lesson. Not go down in the flames.

Yes, I was in the Army for six years. Yes, I was trained as a Pioneer Combat Engineer. Yes, I was taught to clear minefields with a bayonet, build bridges between our infantry and theirs, and duck when the bullets screamed by.

If you think seven years old is too young to remember something like that, you don't know a child whose memory is a video recorder without an erase feature.

As I grew older I could never understand how the German people had allowed it to happen. How ordinary men and women watched it unfold and did nothing. How a civilization that produced Beethoven and Goethe looked away while the ovens ran.

Sheep don't storm castles.

They stand in the field and wait to be shorn. Again and again and again. Occasionally complaining to each other about the cold. Occasionally sharing a strongly worded post about the shearer's technique.

Then they get turned into shepherd's pie.

Back to Superman, because that's what this is all about. Truth, Justice and the American Way. Straight from the 1940's comic books

So I ask you — by today's standards, what is the American Way?

You are in the room. You still have a choice that most of us don't have. We can vote, we can write, we can refuse the checkbox that no longer fits — and we will. But you can do something more immediate.

Were the signs obvious? Yes. Could this have been prevented? Yes. Did it happen purely because of politics? Yes. But we also knew who Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was before he was confirmed, and we knew he was Trump's chosen instrument for reshaping American public health. That makes all of us who watched and waited at least a little complicit in the complacency that allowed it to happen.