Hello from London,

Pick the most significant event of a looming week. How about the Federal Reserve meeting? It’s a safe bet that the governors, influenced or not by months of angry demands from Donald Trump, will at last cut rates. (We look at how America’s economy is holding up in a new article.) Or what about Mr Trump’s state visit to Britain? He comes in the aftermath of a huge rally by the hard right in the British capital. More importantly, he is in Europe just after Russia sent drones deep into NATO airspace, in Poland, the latest test of the Western alliance. Will he show any resolve against Vladimir Putin? (I’m not hopeful.) We have a new article on the need to defend Europe’s skies against the Russians.

I expect, instead, a third event to dominate much public discussion. A memorial for Charlie Kirk is scheduled to happen in a big stadium in Arizona, next Sunday. The murder of the hard-right activist, shot while he was politely debating with students at a public event in Utah, has brought a moment of peril for America. A 22-year-old man is set to be charged. Fascination with the killer is huge—but focusing on the suspect is a mistake. That gives him what he wants: young men (it’s almost always young men) who kill publicly are often seeking notoriety in the first place. 

Debates over who is most responsible for political violence will rage on. (We have an article showing the data on who actually carries out most of it.) That’s troubling, for it coincides with a dour mood in politics and fears that polarisation, and bitter dislike of political rivals, could lead to something even worse. We have written that America faces a choice: assassinations and other political violence could now become more routine, just as mass shootings in American schools, tragically, are so common. Or, with the right sort of leadership, and efforts to lower the political temperature, more violence could be discouraged.

Mr Trump, J.D. Vance and many other MAGA grandees will be at the Arizona memorial. Will those figures talk of trusting the legal process, and the value of thoughtful, not violent, disagreement? Or will there be more casually violent talk, such as Mr Trump’s apparent threat to launch a “war” in Chicago this month? 

A week ago I asked for your views on dysfunction in politics in many democracies, and if there are structural reasons why elected leaders are unpopular almost everywhere. Your responses were overwhelming in number. They were also consistently thoughtful, warm and many were insightful. Nobody was angry. I note ones that came from readers in Borneo, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Iceland, India, Pakistan, Portugal and Switzerland—to name just some of the locations. 

A very large number of you blamed social media for the worsening political division. Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, from Accra, takes issue with my suggestion that having too many cantankerous, older voters may be a problem for democracy. The young are too prone to “clever tweets about a great future waiting around the next sharp bend…Older Africans on the other hand, have lived through decades of military and one-party dictatorships that delivered significantly less than they promised their generation.” Olafur Ragnar Olafsson, in Gardabaer, Iceland, meanwhile sees an upside to ageing societies, suggesting that there could be a “Pax Geriatrica” in future, when leaders and voters are too old to think about going to war. Maybe, Olafur, or maybe not. I’ll simply note that Mr Putin is 72 years old, Binyamin Netanyahu is 75, and Iran’s supreme leader is 86. None has aged into a peaceful twilight. 

For next week, I’d like to know your thoughts after the death of Mr Kirk. Is America strong enough to avoid a turn towards more political violence? Write to me at economisttoday@economist.com.