Death in Tucson

By Michael Nagler

The night after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and six others were shot I happened to be officiating at the celebration for the career of a close friend of mine who has devoted his life to the search for nonviolence and peace.  There were nearly 200 of us from a great variety of organizations, all of which had stories about nonviolent actions and projects they had done that worked.

I must confess that when the shock of grief has worn off after an event like this horrific shooting I hear myself asking my fellow Americans, in some exasperation, how long do you want this to go on?

Happily, this time things were a little bit different, in one respect.  For the first time I am aware of there was, in almost all the commentaries, the hint of an apparently forbidden truth: that we bring violence on ourselves when we promote it, glorify it, or legitimize it, as in this case by the extreme rhetoric associated with former Governor Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

Let us by all means seize on that hint.  It is exactly right that when we are goaded into violence by our words or thoughts we – and not just a few deranged killers – get that much closer to ‘losing it’ and acting out some form of destruction in real life.  Massive scientific evidence confirms this connection, which is anyway obvious if you know anything about human nature.  What we think we eventually do; when we think righteous hatred we will do vile things that are unworthy of us as humans.

Now that the path from Tea Party rhetoric to the bloodying of democracy has been exposed, then, we should hold onto that insight, for it might just save us.

But to make full use of it we have to take it further.  We have to realize, as I suggested above, that this connection is the tip of an iceberg.  Before there was the ‘let’s get ‘em’ rhetoric of the Tea Party there was the incessant, pervasive violence of nearly all our commercial mainstream mass media that makes such rhetoric sound normal.  “Find out how much fun it is to rob, attack, and take out contracts on your friends.”  This is not the raving of an isolated lunatic: it’s the open advertisement of a recent, and I gather a quite popular video game.  We have grown so used to this violence, with its steadily increasing brutality and sophistication that we consider it a normal way to entertain ourselves – and the grim consequences roll on.

The iceberg has another dimension, too.  During the Detroit riots of 1967 President Lyndon Johnson complained, ‘we have passed through a week that no nation should be forced to endure’.  But he had been forcing Vietnam to endure much worse for two years.  He missed the connection.  We must not.  A nation that dedicates itself to the use of violence for its foreign policy (and its entertainment forms, and its criminal justice system) can never expect to live free from violence in its own social fabric.  Life – the human mind – doesn’t work that way.  If we want to live free from violence we have to turn to healthy forms of culture, away from retributive to restorative models of criminal justice, and a foreign policy more like the methods and vision that my friends were sharing in San Francisco the night of the Tucson massacre.  Toning down the incivility and incitement in today’s right-wing rhetoric is a good start, but let us use this tragedy to go much further.

Jared Loughner, the perpetrator of the rampage, is in the hands of the law.  That means that at this point we could make, if we’re not careful, a dangerous mistake: to think that we had solved anything by visiting either our clemency or our desire for revenge on the one person who did the shooting that terrible day.  To wash our hands of the whole affair and our indirect responsibility in it in this way would be to miss an opportunity of national significance.

So let us by all means see to it that the rhetoric of political assassination ends now; but let us also look to all the dimensions of violence that have invaded our culture and politics and replace them with healthier alternatives, lest what died in Tucson be our chance at a robust democracy and a humane life.