The Seed of Hatred Bears Fruit

After the Tucson killings, America needs to tone down its thoughts and its rhetoric.

There’s still a great deal we don’t know about the Tucson bloodbath. Facts are scarce and only a few things seem certain: Six people are dead. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was still fighting for her life on Sunday. Jared Lee Loughner, the suspected shooter, had been arrested and is exercising his Fifth Amendment rights to remain silent to avoid incriminating himself. People can only speculate about the motive behind the attack carried out by the 22-year-old, who is being described as mentally disturbed.

And speculation abounds. Despite there being no evidence as yet as to whether the attack was politically motivated, the incident is being mercilessly politicized. Liberals like Paul Krugman at The New York Times blame conservatives and their rhetoric for the bloodbath. Conservative bloggers claim the attempted assassination was a liberal conspiracy to blame the tea party movement.

That’s the nature of the political discourse in the United States these days — with or without the Tucson assassination attempt. The voice of reason is scarcely heard in America any longer. That voice has no place in the ever-accelerating six-hour television news cycle.

Not that political opponents in Washington have ever handled one another with kid gloves. But the hateful rhetoric between the parties and the brutal, merciless passion that now characterizes their political disagreements have never risen to this level. If Arizona has become the mecca of hate and bigotry, as the Pima County sheriff claims, then Washington is even more so.

Cable news channels like Fox News or MSNBC bombard the parties with screwball one-sidedness. Cartoonists have to mark their cartoons with either a red or a blue flag so editors don’t run the risk of being embarrassed by presenting a wrong (read: differing) opinion. And Sarah Palin, the trigger-happy head of the tea party movement, puts out a “hit list” of representatives that voters are told to “shoot down” in the next elections, complete with crosshair sights on an American map (in Arizona, Gabrielle Giffords’ district was among them).

Who could possibly be surprised when the seeds of such hatred eventually bear fruit? That the deranged or those prone to terrorism reach for their guns? Or that some paranoid country boys might load up a truck with explosives and blow away a government building, as they did in Oklahoma City?

When that happened in 1995, President Bill Clinton was also dealing with a similar climate of political division. That attack was one of the turning points of his presidency, as the Tucson attacks may be in Obama’s. It’s a warning to the newly elected House members that at least politicians should treat one another with civility. If the tragedy of Tucson is to make any sense whatsoever, then it should be to show the American people how important disarmament is in their thoughts and their speech.