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This blog post was submitted by Nicholas R. Lang, a senior at DePaul University. Nick serves as Media Intern for the Interfaith Youth Core and is a resident of the Vincent and Louise House on campus. He is also a co-founder and co-president of DePaul A.V. Club.
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On January 8th, I found out about the shooting of Representative Giffords the same way that most millenials probably did: through a Facebook status update.
At a sharp 3:00 P.M., Cormac Molloy was “shocked that someone shot rep. giffords!”
Initially, I sat unfazed, as the constant barrage of celebrity and semi-celebrity Facebook eulogies can leave even the most dedicated techie in a stupor. I didn’t know whom Giffords was, who shot her or what state she represented, and so I let the moment pass me by with a simple refresh.However, what my mini-feed would soon explain was that on that very morning, a man by the name of Jared Loughner shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. As a Congresswoman, Giffords was many things: the fair-skinned wife of an astronaut, a Democratic holdout in an increasingly conservative state, and, most unfortunately, the object of a deranged man’s obsession.
Six were slain that day by Jared Loughner and two injured, and years from now, none of us will remember where we were when we heard the world was looking for answers. If we ask others about the events that took place that day, what will matter was how you followed the tragedy and what outlets you listened to.
Just hours later, as the world attempted to put the pieces together, we began to assign blame based on scattered details of a murderer’s life, the political affiliations of those involved or a misbegotten map that placed crosshairs over her district.
For the Fox News inclined, Jared Loughner was a “radical leftist.” However, the left saw him as a mobilized Tea Partier, and many of my friends labeled Giffords a victim of Sarah Palin’s violent rhetoric. For them, Giffords quickly became just another casualty in an increasingly toxic American political culture.
Through times of turmoil, many people look to the Seven Stages of Grief for guidance, which can be a telling way to define our trauma. In coping with the violence that erupted in Arizona, Americans quickly moved to that third stage, a place of anger. However, if we as a people desire to move from our initial shock to that final stage of hope, we must do much more than what the next stage asks of us, which is to simply reflect.
We must fully examine the state of our national anger.
Oddly enough, this is exactly what I was doing when I found out about the Giffords attack. When the bullets struck, I was researching the birther movement, a political substratum comprised of individuals who believe that Obama was not born in America, despite evidence to the contrary. For the unfamiliar, many of these citizens likewise resolutely believe that Obama is a Socialist, Hitler, the anti-Christ or any combination of the three.
In researching the role that such opinions might play in their lives, I concluded that such mechanisms allowed birthers and their ideological cousins to deal with the trauma of the 2008 elections. I found a people not only venting on message boards, but I also saw them coping with the fear of a president and an America that no longer looked they did. Out of this chaos, they constructed meaning. They made someone responsible. They found someone to hate.
Although a recent Time article suggested that we are most likely to believe negative information about others when they are of another race or religion, the problem runs deeper than that. When I hear that an online petition is “circulating to [indict] former Alaska governor Sarah Palin for incitement to violence,” I know that such mourners are seeking more than answers or resolution.
They are seeking blood.
At this time of crisis, we should ask questions about the state of America today, but making our neighbors into sworn enemies will never us help to comfort the grieving or make our nation stronger. After September 11th, the Fort Hood massacre, and the Park51 controversy, demonizing Muslims didn’t make us any safer and likely alienated potential allies and radicalized potential friends. Thus, if we continue to make America into a nation divided, we will likely incite the very extremist violence many seem to believe this tragedy is a symbol of.
On his broadcast last Monday, John Stewart instead asked Americans to use this moment as an opportunity to envision a better world, one not defined by the hatred and name-calling that defined our nation over the past week. We will never know what demons drove Jared Loughner to pull the trigger that morning, but we cannot heal by continuing to invest in our own partisan phantoms.
As a nation, we have the ability to tear down the divides that ail us, and at a time when ideologies drive us apart, we must remember to live the example of Dorothy Day, the immortal founder of the Catholic Worker. On the subject of political divides, the once Communist Day famously remarked that she gave up the revolution because it kept her from loving her neighbor. According to her, the more meaningful challenge was instead how to bring out a revolution of the heart.
About a week ago, reports indicated that Gabrielle Gifford finally opened her eyes. Let us hope that our grief-blinded country can soon do the same.