It's A Binary Thing

I'm having some difficulty putting into words my feelings about the events of this weekend in Arizona, and even now I'm not sure I've reached any sort of concrete place with it. I've read some online reactions that ranged from stunned and sad to outraged, but I've seen less than I expected to, and wonder if that's not because a lot of other people are also trying to assimilate their feelings in a meaningful way.

I'm still very much in the sad phase. Sad for the Congresswoman who was doing what all politicians should -- going out in public and hearing the opinions and concerns of the people, all the people, not just the people who agree with them. Sad for the judge and the assistant and the old man shielding his wife and the other bystanders. Sad even a little for the shooter, who clearly needed help for a long time but never found any. But more than anything, I am heartbroken for that nine year old girl, born on 9/11, who did nothing wrong other than be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

There's a lot of talk about the hate-filled rhetoric of the far-right, Sarah Palin's violence-centric public persona, the cross-hairs she put on Democrats on her own website as she urged people to "reload". I abhorred that language then, I abhor it now. My personal opinion of Sarah Palin is one of contempt, and my opinion of those who idolize her and keep her on the national stage varies from a bemused lack of comprehension to a matching contempt. She brings nothing positive, contributes nothing to further our culture or civilization, and seems disinterested in anything other than the cult of herself. That said, I don't know that we've seen clear evidence yet that the shooter was politically motivated in his actions, or had been directly influenced by the hate rhetoric of the right, and I don't know that we can lay blame in any simplistic way on Ms. Palin and the Tea Party. I would not, by any stretch, hold them innocent of this either.

Another of the reactions I've seen after this weekend is to blame insufficient gun control laws for what happened (we're Americans; we like to be able to point at one thing and say definitively, "that's to blame!") Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't like guns. I don't own one, and I don't have any plans to own one. It could happen someday but many circumstances would have to be very different. (On the other hand, I'd really like to learn how to fire one, just for the knowledge/experience of it. But that's neither here nor there.) Just like I don't think Sarah Palin and others of her ilk directly sent out Jared Loughner to kill a Democratic Congresswoman, I don't think we can simplistically say "guns are bad" and feel like we've hit on anything meaningful. And even if we can, in either case, we are still failing utterly to get at the deeper problem. Gun violence is a cough and Sarah Palin is phlegm in the lungs of American culture, both symptomatic of a greater ill.

The thing that links action and effect, the thing that is missing so much lately, is responsibility. We have ceased seeing responsibility as a necessary component of the things we do and the things we say -- responsibility for the consequences of our actions, responsibility for each other, responsibility to the future, responsibility to truth. Guns, and words of hate, and anger and frustration with the impediments and challenges in our own lives, expedite the path between action and effect, and without the filter of responsibility the consequences so often are acts of selfishness, cruelty, tragedy.

On September 11th, in the immediate aftermath of all that senseless bloodshed, there was a moment where all around the world people wanted to stand together, united, against that sort of heinous act. It didn't matter what color, religion, nationality we were, only that we were reasonable people and we would take a stand against unreasonable acts. It didn't last. People who saw only an opportunity for power, who took no responsibility for anything other than satisfying their own wants, turned a unifying moment into perhaps the most divisive era of the modern United States. Too easily, that hyper-nationalism of America Versus The World has shifted both in granularity of focus and intensity of perception to now subdivide us further. Why? For power. (And no, not power for you.) And to that end, if there is no care for larger responsibility, there is no such thing as going too far to get what you want. To some people, bombarded with divisive rhetoric from sources they believe to be trustworthy, the difference between the parties -- which are far slighter than most of us want to admit -- isn't about policy, it's about Good vs. Evil. Facts have become not only irrelevant to the dialogue, but unwanted and suspect; ignorance itself has become synonymous with patriotism.

All of us who have allowed ourselves to accept a dialogue of hate are responsible, and those of us who have the ears and eyes of the nation and abuse that trust to divide and self-empower, with no care for any harm done, are the worst perpetrators of the rot at the heart of our society. If there was hope born in those terrible moments of September 11th, it was that brief glimpse that something better could come out of such awful acts. Every child born on that day -- on any day -- should be a promise for the future, a living reminder of our obligations to the world at large, that we should take care in what we do and take care of one another, that we should stand together and in reason and compassion and mercy and respect work to find our common ground for the betterment of all people, everywhere. Instead we have been given a stark and sudden reminder of the low to which we have sunk, where the atmosphere of vitriolic hatred, the deliberately calculated language of incitement to violence, and a refutation of all responsibility for truth or justice or just plain reasonableness has claimed one nine-year-old promise of something better as its newest, but certainly not its last, victim.

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( some followup comments )

So, a Monday news quiz. First, look at the following photograph from CNN.com.
( The Photo )
( Now for your tricky quiz question )

Perhaps the most articulate comment possible on this whole Elliot Spitzer debacle (gakked from Making Light)

You know, forty years from now we'll look back and think about all the handsome, talented, interesting actors and actresses who died too young, and wonder why it is that we're still stuck with Carrot Top and f!@%ing Tom Cruise.

Don't get me wrong, this is FANTASTIC, but... Iowa? That I would *not* have guessed. Here's hoping this amazing step forward out of bigotry and discrimination is allowed to stand.

A man has been charged with stealing $250,000 worth of Skittles. I wonder how many singing rabbits that would buy?