David Woodbury lives in New Boston.

I am an old man. My wife of fifty-five years and I live in a small house on a back road in a small town in a small state tucked in a distant corner of this country. My wife and I have both retired from honorable professions. We rely heavily, but not exclusively on Social Security.

My wife keeps a garden in our front yard which gives joy each summer to all who pass by. I do my share in local organizations and government. I play my fiddle. We are neither proud nor ashamed of ourselves. When we go, for a while we will be remembered as decent people who did our part. Then, we will be lost to time.

As a young adult, I would have found the suggestion that I was ashamed of the United States of America appalling. Not that we always did the best or wisest thing; we can always look back on things that should not have been. But by and large, since the abolition of slavery, our nation’s motives have not been venal, corrupt or the product of mental aberration. But that was then.

Now I see a grainy video on the television of a young Turkish woman doing nothing more threatening than planning on meeting friends to share a meal being dragged screaming from the public street and carried, by force, to God knows where. The half dozen or so men and women committing this assault were afraid to show their faces, cowering behind hoodies and face masks, even though they would be patted on the back by their superiors for a job well done.

We’ve seen terrorists do this for years. This is no exception.

This attack had nothing to do with the woman herself, it was an attack by our government on all of us. Her crime, you ask? Why, she expressed an opinion at odds with that of the regime. This was an opinion shared in whole or in part by many people, but she was uniquely vulnerable because, as a citizen of Türkiye, she was legally here on a visa. Additionally, she was a woman and an intellectual, a PhD candidate at a prestigious university in the northeast.

Little Marco Rubio, a person in power who abhors those who “make a ruckus,” decided to authorize this attack in hopes of what? Making us all conform to his view of the world and that of the regime he serves. Take no comfort in the fact that this was a one-off event, it isn’t. It is simply easier at this point in time to target non-white, non-Christian members of a minority perceived by some to be “taking advantage of our hospitality.”

If the regime is allowed to proceed without dissent in its attack on normal human discourse, we who look on with passivity will be next.