Daily Inspiration Quote by John Burns

There is something deliberately chilly about Burns choosing “depressed” over “outraged.” It’s not the language of a hotheaded agitator; it’s the diction of someone watching a political fever become a social climate. “Rather” is the pivot: it rejects the expected focus (a single incident, a rival faction, the usual partisan culprits) and redirects attention to the pattern. Burns isn’t tallying individual acts of violence. He’s diagnosing a national mood.

The phrase “wave of brutality” does heavy lifting. A wave implies force, momentum, contagion - something that picks up ordinary people and carries them along. It’s a way of blaming systems without letting the public off the hook. Burns frames brutality not as an aberration but as a sweeping condition, suggesting that institutions, headlines, and crowd psychology are conspiring to normalize cruelty. The subtext is moral exhaustion: he’s less shocked by any one blow than by how easily the country is learning to swing.

Context matters because Burns is an activist of the industrial age: labor conflict, state repression, imperial anxieties, and a press culture newly capable of amplifying panic and spectacle. Read against that backdrop, the line works as both warning and plea. He’s trying to puncture the adrenaline of righteous violence by naming it as national decline, a civic weather system that will not stop at the “deserving” targets. The intent isn’t to win an argument; it’s to stop the tide.