I’m sure you’ve already heard, Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Congresswoman who was shot by a mentally ill man last January, has announced that she will resign from Congress this week to focus on her recovery. I’m going to join in with everyone else and say that I wish her continued speed in that recovery. In her video, which I have embedded below, she says she will return. That is, of course entirely up to her, but I would love to see it happen.
I’ve been following this on CNN.
That’s Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Three days ago she was sworn into her third term in Congress. Yesterday she read the first amendment on the floor of the House of Representatives. Today she was shot in the head by a nut. That nut apparently shot nineteen other people as well and six of them, including a federal judge and a nine-year old girl, are reported dead. It goes without saying that my thoughts are with the victims and their families. You’d think we as a nation would step back, take a deep breath and say “Dude, what the hell are we doing? Demonizing public officials only creates an atmosphere that sets volatile crazies off and then people get hurt. We need too calm down.”
Nope!
People are already trying to sniff out his political affiliation so they can add that to the long list of why everyone on the left or the right – wherever he happens to fall – should be despised, written off, imprisoned, stripped of citizenship, charged with treason, etc. They see this as the perfect time to ratchet up the vitriol to deliver the knockout punch. Yes, please, by all means, let’s make the country so polarized that every individual with an iffy grasp of their sanity goes off and shoots an elected official because that’s obviously what civilized societies do when everyone doesn’t agree. How much more wrong can they be and how much longer are they going to stay that way?
It isn’t a conservative/liberal thing. It’s the tainted nature of the discourse that’s the problem. Pundits on the left and right, I’m taking about you. I don’t care if this guy was a “Takin’ my country back,” or a “They’re trying to take my country away and turn back the clock to 1776,” person. The result was tragic, why make it worse. There is no dishonor in not calling someone evil. Since when does name-calling equal strength anyway? I hope we learn how to disagree politically without disparaging each other to no end, but I’m hardly optimistic. We’ve had this conversation before and, if nothing changes regarding the way we treat each other and our elected officials, I feel we will be having this conversation again as more people will be hurt .
Discourse in C# Minor 