From 1981: Thoughts on yesterday’s outrage | Chuck Stone

This column originally appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News on March 31, 1981. On Monday, Chuck Stone was honored with a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

He’s not old enough to be my father.

Perhaps, an older brother. Or, next door’s good-natured neighbor. Somebody you instinctively like because he’s a genuinely nice guy.

I keep trying to reconcile two images of Ronald Reagan. The sunshine-smiling candidate I interviewed at his California home last July. The other, the world’s most important statesman, now lying in a hospital bed with a bullet wound in his chest.

WHEN WILL WE STOP reliving these grotesque nightmares of assassinations?

John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Mrs. Martin Luther King Sr.

Assassination attempts on George Wallace, Gerald Ford, Vernon Jordan, and now Ronald Reagan.

Within us we seem to nourish a violent disease that has tried to exterminate three presidents and two presidential candidates — not over some long span of history — but in the shockingly short period of less than two decades.

I don’t weep for my country.

I mourn for its declining stability. I am saddened by our national failure to contain the caveman within us.

Somehow a sector of America has lost its ability to internalize stress. To them, dissent is an alibi for a beastly exercise in problem solving.

SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIALS cannot resolve a nation’s problems.

Ronald Reagan has caused me problems from Day 1.

I’ve been fond of him ever since a first exclusive interview in a Philadelphia hotel room in the summer of 1978. Lyn Nofziger and Gloria Eatoote had conspired to help me pull it off.

Repeated contacts only strenghtened my affection for " The Gipper."

Yet, in the past 30 days, no presidential legislative programs have appalled or disturbed me more.

And I still refuse to dislike him.

How can anybody reject the courageous impishness of a man who tells his wife as he enters the hospital, " Honey, I forgot to duck."

The president’s humor continued when he spotted all of his aides outside the operating room and quipped, “who’s minding the store?”

THE SASSINESS I HAD seen in his Pacific Palisades living room erupted again when he glanced up at the doctors and grinned, " I hope you’re all Republicans."

I think it’s a measure of the need of Reagan and his staff to reassure us that Lyn Nofziger, a White House wit, would dwell on those flashes of comforting humor. They put a nation at ease and helped heal our anxiety.

So I find myself looking unapologetically beyond my lovable friend and condemning instead " Stockman’s war on the poor," Richard Allen’s alliance with South Africa’s apartheid and the Moral Majority’s born-again racism.

Stubbornly, I still cannot bring myself to blame him, knowing full well he is the president and accepting completely that he is the final arbiter of those life-depriving budget cuts.

Affection can blind you to the hard truths of political reality.

YET, AFFECTION MUST never blindfold us to the obdurate ugliness of Murder Facilitators Inc., The National Rifle Association.

How long do we tolerate these apologists for assassinations?

How long do we permit them to lobby for the right of citizens to walk the streets with guns as if they were students lugging books or businessmen carrying briefcases?

How long must millions of Americans scurry in fear, held hostage by assassins and murderers, all because a bunch of primordial fanatics at the National Rifle Association are convinced bullets are a measure of testicular power?

How many presidents must be killed before America puts the National Rifle Association out of business?

Two weeks ago, both Time and Newsweek magazine front-covered the mushrooming street crime that has transformed our cities into armed camps.

BUT WE ARE VICTIMIZED as much by the National Rifle Association as we are by organized crime, unorganized assaults and disorganized assassinations.

And we are all poorer for it.

We are also poorer for the burden of collective guilt black people must carry.

After the reports of the attempt on President Reagan’s life, several blacks called me.

They were as anxious about the president’s condition as they were about the color of the assassin.

When I described him, they exhaled a sigh of relief. " Thank God!" exclaimed one influential black Philadelphian. " If it had been a black man, we would have caught hell."

What a tragic commentary on this nation’s racist cesspool.

Yet, as the people we can rise above these divisions. In times of crises, we become one.

YOU’VE PROBABLY THOUGHT of already doing it, but send President Reagan a card, a letter, a telegram, flowers — anything that will tell a nice guy who finished first — we love you, Mr. President.

Then start thinking about what we can do to create a gun-free society.