EXCERPT:
The Tucson tragedy has triggered a succession of supposedly sage commentaries concerning "cause and effect" in American life and politics. Was the shooter incited by the high-octane vitriol of contemporary political "discourse"? Was he enabled, by the ease of legal gun and ammunition sales in Arizona, to arm himself despite his record of instability? Was he merely and totally deranged?
Behind "cause and effect," of course, is the question of blame. Are easy guns to blame for what happened? Are talk show and cable TV propagandists to blame? Is Sarah Palin to blame? Are those who attack her to blame?
The answers depend, of course, on who gets asked. Gun-control advocates blame guns. People on the left blame vitriol on the right. Commentators on the right blame blamers on the left, saying vitriol has nothing to do with it and that only the criminal is to blame for his crime. And Palin ends up blaming the shooting’s Jewish victim for acting like an anti-Semite by committing "blood libel."
Barack Obama attempted to rise above the nastiness by calling for an end to the blame game and a new discourse that promotes healing rather than further wounds. But I fear that we Americans currently lack a fundamental ingredient necessary to make such a healing discourse possible. True, politicians may "scale back" their rhetoric in the wake of this tragedy, but that may mean simply that they avoid speaking their mind and heart until a decent interval has passed and some new controversy arrives.
Genuinely healing discourse -- the kind capable of uniting a deeply divided nation -- requires more than simply softening our rhetoric. It requires something that will enable us all to speak our minds and hearts without rancor, bitterness, or mean-spirited attacks on others. And that "something" seems to be missing.
This goes, I believe, to the notion of "civic virtues" -- the public values that anchor our life together as Americans. The Pledge of Allegiance promises a nation "with liberty and justice for all," but I get frustrated and even worried whenever Americans speak or act as though those two civic virtues are all we need. In fact, they may be precisely what divides us, with liberals calling for action to promote "social justice" while conservatives tout "individual freedom" as the absolute value. In such a climate, liberty and justice, left by themselves, end up pitted against one another.
What is missing here?
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