Well Done, Mr. President

It was just what we needed in the wake of the horrific Tucson shooting: An uplifting speech by the president which highlighted the bravery and heroism of the people during that terrible moment on Saturday morning.

Husbands who threw their bodies on top of their wives to try to shield them from gunfire. A congressional aide who darted through the lethal chaos to attend to wounded Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and apply pressure to her wounds. The people who wrestled the shooter to the ground and wrangled his ammo out of his hands, risking their own lives.

We, collectively, were uplifted by the life stories of those who were killed, the woman who volunteered at her church, the high school sweethearts who’d reunited, the young Congressional staffer who had big ideas of how government could help people. We learned that Giffords had opened her eyes for the very first time since being shot. And then there was the 9-year-old girl, Christina Taylor Green whose story President Obama told in such a tastefully poignant fashion that it brought me to tears.

And the president took pains to say that we shouldn’t blame political rhetoric for the actions of a disturbed man bent on violence. Instead of blaming and finger pointing, the president called upon us to lift up one another by communicating our political differences in civil terms and mold ourselves into the kind of nation that the young, idealistic Christina, born on 9/11/01, would have wanted to see in the country of which she was so proud: “She saw all of this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism of vitriol that we adults all too often take for granted. I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.” When he threw in the line about how he imagined that Christina was “jumping in rain puddles” in heaven, the word that came to my mind: “Beautiful.”

It was a healing speech full of hope -- not anger, not partisanship, not blaming. It was full of tales that remind us that there are many more people in the world who are good and generous and brave and loving and hopeful even in the face of evil. And that’s what we needed to hear, at least that’s what I needed to hear.

Then this morning while watching Morning Joe, I heard that Colorado Senator Mark Udall is urging that during the January 25 State of the Union speech in the House chambers that the members from the Republican and Democratic parties sit amidst and next to one another as opposed to segregated on opposite sides of the room.

“Beyond custom, there is no rule or reason that on this night we should emphasize divided government, separated by party, instead of being seen united as a country,” Udall said in a press statement. “. . . Perhaps by sitting with each other for one night we will begin to rekindle that common spark that brought us here from 50 different states and widely diverging backgrounds to serve the public good.”

That, I think, is a brilliant idea would embody the notion that we are all Americans, no matter our views on tax policy, education reform and keeping troops in Afghanistan.

Processing the Tucson/Giffords Shooting

We all want answers but answers might be hard to come by after a reportedly mentally disturbed 22-year-old opened fire this weekend on a public gathering featuring a U.S. Congresswoman and her constituents outside of a grocery store in Tucson.

We all want it to be easy to be able to point to someone, or a group of people, and say, “There! She’s responsible! She’s the reason why this happened!” or “They did it! Their inflammatory signs made the shooter snap!” or “His parents! They must've been bad!”

But sometimes the uncomfortable fact is that there are no answers because there are unstable people who live in this world who will, one way or another, try to hurt others. And as far as the shooter in Tucson, we might not know for some time whether anything could have been legally or morally done to prevent what happened on Saturday. As we get more information, maybe that question will be addressed more comprehensively. We'll have to wait and see on that front.

In the meantime, it’s sickening to see that the folks who reside on the outer left and right fringes of the political spectrum have their index fingers poised in the pointing position and are blaming the people who hold the polar opposite political beliefs than them for the actions of a mentally unstable individual.

When I was at my daughter’s basketball game on Saturday I was keeping close tabs on the breaking news via Twitter about Rep. Gabby Giffords and the folks who came to see her who police said were gunned down by Jared Loughner. And as news reports were flooding in – many of them containing erroneous information – the blaming started right there on Twitter. It was Sarah Palin’s fault. It was the Tea Partiers. It was talk radio. It was Snooki. (Just kidding, no one blamed Snooki, at least for this incident.) They didn’t wait to see what information we learned about the shooter and his background and whether, in fact, his motivation could be discerned at all. They just impulsively blamed their political foes.

Then the folks on the right got angry and said there was no evidence that the shooter was one of them. Then the finger pointing was returned and the likes of Keith Olbermann and left-leaning bloggers were blamed for THEIR angry words.

Enough.

Seriously.

I hate watching people try to score political points while a set of parents is burying their 9-year-old daughter who went to visit her congresswoman at an event at grocery store and would up being murdered, and while a congresswoman had parts of her skull removed so the swelling in her brain, through which the bullet traveled, won't cause more damage. This is not the time to try to "score" political points.

So when I read David Brooks’ column in the New York Times this morning, I finally found something with which I could agree:

“These accusations – that political actors, contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl – are extremely grave. They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky. They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.


. . . [T]he political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible.”

Brooks seems to share a similar view on how this whole thing has played out as The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, he of the famous “Rally for Sanity,” of which we could use a whole lot more. (See his commentary above.) I especially loved the part where Stewart said in his monologue:

“We live in a complex ecosystem of influences and motivations and I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric any more than I would blame heavy metal music for Columbine, and by the way that is coming from somebody who truly hates our political environment. It is toxic. It is unproductive but to say that that is what has caused this . . . that I just don’t think you can do.”

I too want to see more political moderation, want to see the end of the political tactic of transforming and dehumanizing those who don’t believe what you believe into enemies who hate America, ascribing to them all manner of evil (which is why something like a No Labels movement appeals to me). But that’s a discussion for another day. Not today.

I think it’s a sad state of affairs when some of the most sane commentary we’re heard can be found on Comedy Central.