Last month, a bullet whizzed through the right ear of former U.S. President Donald Trump, streaking—with several others—into the crowd behind him. By the day’s end, a firefighter in the audience behind him lay dead. Others were hospitalized.

At once, social media were afire with flying outrage. On Instagram, young men idolized how “badass” the bloodied Mr. Trump appeared in photographs of the would-be assassination. Leftists questioned why this shooting should be more newsworthy than the dozens of daily killings of Gazan Palestinians at the hands of Israeli troops. Others lamented that the shooter missed. The fervent religious urged prayer. On Facebook, aging reactionary-traditionalists with their poorly cropped, awkwardly angled profile pictures and limping grammar declared Trump’s survival an “act of God”—I could not help but wonder what kind of God would spare a 78-year-old hyper-wealthy adulterer and punch a bullet-hole through a firefighter’s chest instead.

It was the first news-piece in years that evoked such obvious division among those in my digital environs. Dizzying were the politically charged calls for violence, religious dogma, conspiracies, and ill-will that swirled around it all. I could find few sensible voices among them—few who expressed a distaste for Mr. Trump’s regressive policymaking but who recognized the slippery-slope danger of taking guns to your political foes. I had long heard that political polarization was a great threat to the modern day, and had dismissed it as illusory. This event, though—provoking the loudest extremes of my lifetime—compelled me to reexamine that notion.

Why have we reached this point?

Honestly, I first considered that the problem might lie in the shrinking social circles of the modern human. Decade after decade, the average number of close friends of any particular individual contracts—perhaps it is that we are now feeling less heard than ever, and lean on increasingly glaring opinions on social media for the sensation of being seen. More likely, though, our negativity bias may be to blame. Yes, social media may push a few among us to scream radical thought-lines to the wind—but, as human being are uniquely attuned to process negative information, it may also be that these few are unduly magnified in our heads, their incendiary but ultimately rare opinions eternally emblazoned on the pixels around us. This, I think, has become the most reasonable explanation to me after reflection. Yes, I am able to re-open on the typically dormant Facebook app on my phone and reliably see provocative political swill, but it is ultimately spouted only by a tiny yet loud minority of users.

Indeed, perhaps it is not even a remarkable “point” that we have reached.

Maybe we can even glean an optimistic conclusion from this.

In my sophomore year of college, a professor of mine chronicling the United States’ western expansion once relayed an experience his grandfather had with a man waiting in line with him at a bank in the 1930s—one in which the man openly fulminated against the sitting President Franklin D. Roosevelt, calling him a “damned cripple” who ought to be “shot”. Startled, I at once could only think: “that would never happen today!” The professor had explained it as if it were emblematic of many rural Tennesseans’ feelings at the time—but today, that kind of slur-tinged threatening would be rare even on social media, and far more so in physical life.

We must not forget that almost a million Americans bled cold into grass and ditches during our Civil War—a war fought over a policy issue aggravated to include cultural and racial entanglements. In other words, our deadliest war was fought over political polarization more than 150 years ago. To say that political polarization is at its worst today is an almost offensive farce that can be produced only by an ignorance to how far we have advanced. The fact it seems that way is merely because, save for activists’ work, the few who dare to speak publicly on politics on our ever-present social media are often those compelled to do so by their radical and unsavory opinions. There rests a colossal unposting majority underneath it that we must recall has lost the spirit for violent and vulgar confrontation which formerly existed in this county and beyond which we have largely matured.

Bear in mind this when you must next face the digital world—weigh the words of the wild against the enormous number of silent watchers. Let them make fools of themselves, and wear an amused smile in knowing that the reserved are on the right side of it all. Give the polarized no oxygen.