Feeling restless on a Sunday night back in late July, I started combing through my many streaming services to find something interesting to watch. After viewing several movie trailers, I came across “In the Shadow of the Moon.”
A 2019 Netflix original, the film was advertised as a science-fiction thriller about a Philadelphia detective obsessed with capturing a female serial killer who showed up once every nine years — 1988, 1997, 2006 and 2015 — to claim her victims. I was sold.
As the movie progresses, the detective’s life slowly unravels as his pursuit of the serial killer consumes him. His theories of a killer from the future traveling backward in time are dismissed by others. However, by the time he confronts the killer face-to-face in the film’s climactic scene, he realizes his theory was spot on.
The killer, who reveals herself to be the detective’s granddaughter, explains her actions were meant to prevent a catastrophic civil war — essentially eliminating those who provoked a conflict. She said it began with a single attack in 2024 but raged on for years.
“The world as you know it will end in a very short time, and you have no idea it’s coming,” she warned. “Eleven thousand people died the first morning, millions more in the civil war that followed.”
What she said next about the agitators and their movement sent a chill down my spine.
“It fed on anger. It spread through fear. It made monsters out of men. Until even the ordinary were broken, one by one,” she explained. “The voice that gave birth to a movement turned a small crack into a great divide. It drowned out the best of us, and it amplified the worst.”
For sure, as is often the case with sci-fi flicks, “In the Shadow of the Moon” stretches things. However, while the film’s plot is certainly fiction, its storyline illustrates many of the hateful and divisive seeds being sowed right now in real life.
We’ve witnessed the sour fruit yielded from those seeds when insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when an attacker set afire the home of the Pennsylvania governor in April, and when a gunman murdered a Minnesota state representative and her husband in their home in June and seriously wounded another lawmaker.
But we’ve also seen it when two Israeli embassy workers were killed in Washington, D.C., in May, when a federal officer was shot outside a Texas immigrant detention facility in July, and just this past week when a popular and polarizing conservative activist was gunned down in cold blood on a university stage in Utah.
Regardless of whether it comes from the right or from the left, political violence is all wrong.
Sadly, it appears our philosophical and political differences are increasingly leading to violent, and too often deadly, confrontations.
When I first discovered politics in my youth, I routinely watched the Sunday morning news roundtables to hear the political debates of the time. Those discussions were true debates where the participants offered points and counterpoints. For the most part, the comments stayed above board.
I can also remember hearing of bipartisan legislation where lawmakers from the right and the left compromised to get things done. Political figures were often celebrated for their abilities to reach across the aisle.
But bipartisanship is no longer a selling point. Instead, it’s often viewed as a sign of weakness or capitulation.
In the social media era of today, the slings and arrows routinely fly from the right and the left. The fact-driven arguments of years past have been replaced by over-the-top and below-the-belt commentary.
We’re no longer having arguments about policy or strategy. We’re not really listening to each other at all.
Nowadays, we’re more likely to hear politicians hurl insults at their political opponents, calling them incompetent, untruthful and corrupt. To make their points, we often hear them attack fellow Americans, or those who desperately want to be Americans, calling them criminals and monsters.
However, such political vitriol doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It spills over to the liberal and conservative masses where it breeds righteousness on each side for their own views and builds resentment for the other side.
The end result, as it was in the movie, could be a widening of the gulf between Americans from a small crack to a great divide. And once we no longer see the humanity in each other, we’re more likely to pick up a weapon and ready ourselves for combat.
The most serious threat to our nation might not be a foreign power. If it continues to spread unchecked, our own divisiveness could lead to our demise.
Alden Loury is data projects editor for WBEZ and writes a column for the Sun-Times.