By the way – you can read your 2011 Annual Horoscope Here.
What a week. I’ve seldom seen the press so tongue-tied about who should say what or how much. I note how far we’ve fallen from a rational, thinking populace that had the wit to quickly assess a problem, find its cause and remedy its effect. This nation was once confident in its checks and balances, able finally to shame McCarthy into obscurity and Nixon into powerlessness, able to agree that yelling fire in a crowded theater could only produce disaster and chaos. We once achieved such rational behavior, even if only for a handful of decades when middle class sensibilities prevailed. Perhaps that was too brief a period to count as a national marker, a period that never actually defined us. But I was young then, and I remember feeling something more solid than myth and only slightly less than constant. I felt it and I was proud of who we were.
We could use some of that skill, confidence and pride today, facing so bold an assault on our emotions as the tragedy in Tucson. And tragedy it is, robbing us of some fine and largely innocent souls, along with a sense of control. The nation had a moment of stunned silence last weekend before the talking heads began to chatter, but we couldn’t reasonably have been shocked. I haven’t been shocked since a man many never accepted as our legitimate president told the nation we had to choose between standing with him or with the nation’s enemies, that with or without us he was putting the full weight of the union behind the consequences. In such a political climate, how could we possibly control our Becks, our Palins or our Limbaughs?
Given the increasingly violent rhetoric of this period, few of us on the left were surprised at a massacre in a Safeway parking lot, nor should those on the political right be shocked who claim they have been victimized and targeted all the way back to Civil War Reconstruction and beyond. Their feud with liberals is old, cherished and served cold whenever possible. Tribal wounds and grievances that hold possibilities of violence go back to Cain and Abel, festering most successfully in minds unable to sort facts from fantasy, and therefore unable to proceed with reason.