I had already intended to go to the Congressional Baseball Game on the 15th of June with a society of which I was a member when I had heard of the shooting of the practicing Republicans in Alexandria, Virginia. I had heard of it first in a conversation between coworkers in an elevator in my office on Washington’s Massachusetts Avenue. Being from Arlington, the county right to the north of Alexandria, I was rather disturbed by it.

Alexandria was a place to me that was always there, always with something interesting going on. My father and I would go exploring Old Town, beholding the towering Masonic Temple. Whenever I needed to take the train south to Williamsburg for college, I would leave from the Alexandria Amtrak station, and would arrive there when coming back. More recently I had gone ballroom dancing several times at a studio off of Duke Street, a large street second only to Old Town’s King Street. Alexandria, therefore, was always something familiar.

And so hearing about this attack hit very close to home. Generally speaking, Arlington, Alexandria, and the rest of the Northern Virginia region are safe places; the only major violent instances in the new millennium were the September 11th attacks on the Pentagon and the snipers a few years afterwards. This was stunning in a way that I hadn’t seen in the years I had been paying attention to the news. In a way it felt like my home was under attack.

Seeing the motivations of the attacker, a rabid anti-Trump activist from Illinois, reminded me of how much we need the Congressional Baseball Game. The Game itself, held at the baseball stadium used by the Washington Nationals stadium on East Capitol street, is a celebration of bipartisanship and common ground, a reminder that on the whole we are not so different.

The divisive nature of contemporary politics highlights the need for the game and that for which it stands. All too often we see each other as baskets of deplorables and as gaggles of snowflakes, to give but two terms of abuse, and fail to see the very real issues and philosophies behind political differences. Politics is something that is inherently divisive, and so we must ensure that the ties that bind us are stronger than the forces that attempt to rip us apart, to ensure that our house is not divided and so will continue to stand. That is the ultimate message of the Congressional Baseball Game.