One day in 1963, while cleaning my M14 rifle and sitting on my footlocker in the Fort Dix recruits’ barracks, our typically authoritative and gruff platoon sergeant sauntered through the door. In an uncharacteristically mild tone of voice, he commanded “Atten-hut!”

Everyone snapped to attention, and in a matter-of-fact fashion the sergeant announced, “President Kennedy has just been assassinated. Carry on, troops.” He turned and left, seemingly indifferent to the astounding news he had just delivered.

Shock pervaded the barracks. A deafening silence ensued. Fifty young soldiers froze in place — some with transfixed gazes, while others glanced nervously around the room, their eyes looking for a place to land. Some recruits were stiff, tearful, hiding their crying eyes. At that moment, one soldier leaped from his top bunk, and with outstretched celebratory arms shouted, “Fantastic! I hated that son of a bitch,” as he spun circles in the center of the room while howling additional epithets.

This was my second incomprehensible moment in a matter of minutes. What? Joy at the assassination of the president? The soldier’s exuberance and the sergeant’s seeming indifference baffled me.

In that moment, for the first time in my life it occurred to me that we might be “one nation, under God, indivisible,” but were living in two different Americas.

Not only were our political differences greater than I had ever imagined, but now the core decency of humanity was also at stake. How could the assassination of a president be so readily acceptable? Was political violence — murder of all things — now on the table?

Five years later, in April of 1968, Martin Luther King was shot and killed. Two months after that, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and in 1970, four students at Kent State University in Ohio were shot dead with others wounded by the Ohio National Guard.

So I found John Landis’ piece in the Jan. 29 edition of the Chestnut Hill Local, “Choosing the path away from fascism,” compelling. This line in particular caught my attention: “I have come to understand that fascism is a pathway, not a destination.” I began to wonder, could this be the unstated and perhaps, as of yet, undetected, great divide in this country? Fascism vs. democracy! Fascism is authoritarianism with a hateful racist ideology at its core.

Violence has long been a part of our nation’s history. But the recent killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents suggests that violence has taken us to a new place — a place never before seen or imagined. Killings by lone assassins or panic by guardsmen is not the same as brutality by a government against its own citizens.

From 2024 to the present, more than a dozen deaths throughout the country have been linked to the Department of Homeland Security. In Buffalo, N.Y., a visually impaired, non-English-speaking Rohingya refugee from Myanmar was found dead after being taken into custody and then abandoned in a parking lot on a cold February night by U.S. Border Patrol agents; on April 1, the county medical examiner announced that the death was related to hypothermia and dehydration, and had been ruled a homicide. Many others have died in ICE detention camps. These deaths stem from policies originating in the White House.

But you don’t risk losing your democracy simply by such acts. You potentially lose it through acts such as an assault on voting rights, undermining the peaceful transfer of power, refusal to accept electoral outcomes, using the presidency to target political opponents, profiting financially from the office, obstructing federal investigations, denying due process, using executive power beyond statutory authority, tolerating or encouraging political violence, and suppressing Article I rights of freedom of speech and the press.

In contrast to an America that is a beacon for freedom, opportunity, and hope as Republican President Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” suggested, NYU Professor Scott Galloway believes that we are indeed on a “slow burn towards fascism.”

Benjamin Franklin famously remarked that our republic will survive “if you can keep it.” He meant that you protect democracy by defending it and pushing back against those who would take it from us. Franklin’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, reaffirmed this, saying that the American experiment in self-government would fail otherwise.

What saves a failing democracy is civic responsibility and citizen participation. If we do not protect and defend our democracy — no matter how far-fetched it may seem at the moment — yes, absolutely, without doubt, we can lose it.

Paul Rappoport is a Wyndmoor resident.