In the midst of a Covid surge last year, long before the nation’s top health officials said that it was safe not to cover our faces outdoors, I was accosted at a gas station along the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut for wearing a mask.

There I was, absent-mindedly pumping fuel into my rental car, when I heard a man shouting. A few seconds passed before I realized that his words were directed at me.

“Take off your mask!” he yelled, with an expletive mixed in. I looked away, but he kept at it. He called me an “idiot.” A “moron.” My refusal to acknowledge him only incensed him further. His voice somehow grew louder, his tone even more menacing.

I walked inside the station, to still my heart and take a breath. From that perch of relative safety, I could see that he was in an enormous pickup truck decorated with #MAGA regalia. He was perhaps in his mid-20s and slight in build, probably not a pound over 150. Still, he terrified me.

He and his truck hadn’t budged five minutes later, when I felt I had to liberate the pump I’d used and be on my way. So I went back to my car. The haranguing instantly resumed.

“Do you do everything you’re told to?” he screamed. “You’re the problem! You’re why we’re no longer free!”

But the scariest part came next. The scariest part was what he teased out in me. As I pulled away, my blood at full boil, I lowered my window and began screeching my own insults, venting my own rage.

Then I spent the next 30 minutes staring into my rearview mirror.

I thought a lot about that flamboyant ugliness, that florid enmity, as I read the news out of Texas last week.

It’s outrageous to me that the state would curtail abortion rights to the extent that it did — outlawing the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, a point at which many women might not even realize that they’re pregnant — but there’s an extra heap of cruelty and recklessness in how the state did so. It empowered Texans themselves to enforce this regressive new reality. It encouraged them to turn against, and turn in, one another.

As Tara Palmeri explained succinctly and chillingly in Politico’s Playbook newsletter on Sunday, the Texas measure “allows anyone to sue a private citizen they suspect of having aided in such an abortion, including, for instance, an Uber driver who takes a woman to a clinic. Successful plaintiffs get a minimum of $10,000 and their legal fees paid for; successful defendants don’t get to recoup their costs.”

My Times colleague Bret Stephens, no liberal, called this “vigilante justice.” He’s right and he’s not alone. It tells one group of Americans not merely to engage in political battle against people with whom they strongly disagree, which is civilized, but to spy on them, stop them and ensure their punishment. That’s uncivilized. It’s flat-out dangerous to boot.

It harshly divides citizens: angels here, demons there. It summons some of them to a crusade. It’s an authorization of enmity and a validation of ugliness in a country with surfeits of both, a country in which people on opposite sides of the partisan divide already see their opponents not as ill informed but as illegitimate, even evil.

Increasingly, I worry that all of America is that Connecticut gas station, each of us on the precipice of a destructive fury or already over the cliff. We need our leaders to pull us back and pull us up. Republican lawmakers in Texas just egged us on.

-Frank Bruni Newsletter, Sept 9 2021