Dear Friends: I know that many of you ask to hear my thoughts in moments like these and there is no question that I have yet to get my head around the events that happened at the Capitol on Wednesday. I want to write to say that this is un-American, but, as much as I want to say those words, the reality is that this virulent strand of violence is very much American. From The Knight Riders, the militant band of tobacco farmers who burned the farms of poor growers in Kentucky in the 1900s to Timothy McVeigh and the Michigan Militia that were responsible from the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1996 1995; from the neo-Nazis who took shelter in Idaho in the 1990s to the people who attempted to kidnap Michigan Governor Jennifer Whitmer just last year; from Ku Klux Klan terrorizing blacks in the Deep South to the beatings by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday in 1965; from the Birmingham Church Bombing that killed Condoleezza Rice’s childhood frien...