The things we choose to say

[bodlon]

By now I think most people have heard about the shooting at a Tuscon, AZ Safeway that killed several people and wounded over a dozen more, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-D).

I’ve been keeping mum here about this mostly because I’ve wanted to avoid falling into the trap that seems to be the Outrage du Jour, namely blaming one political group or another for shooter Jared Lee Loughner’s actions. It occurred to me tonight, after seeing this video, that the conversation I didn’t want to have isn’t the conversation that needs having, and that the one that does need to be had needs to be had now.

Words have power. The words we use for ourselves, and for others, have power. They reflect and affect the way we see ourselves and one another. They color the discourse. What we call ourselves, our views, and those who disagree with us is the framework by which we form and understand relationships, friendly or bitter.

When we use the rhetoric of violence, when we use language that promotes fear or hate, when we position ourselves to disagree in ways that preclude even the possibility of discussion or discount that discussion because it is less romantic to us then barging in with guns and winning the day with a show of force, we perpetuate a culture in which shootings like this are not only possible, they are assured.

The last election cycle, in which candidates were explicitly telling their supporters to make their opponents fearful, and in which individuals carried and discharged weapons at rallies where candidates skirted sedition should have been our national wake-up call. We have so polarized the discourse that it is more natural than not to view the individual on the other side of the aisle as an enemy who wishes us harm.

People, I should not feel the same way about a political party with which I disagree as I was told to feel about the USSR when I was a child. Nobody should feel this way. Are the stakes incredibly high? For some of us, yes. But unless we dial back the rhetoric — not the ideals, not the causes, but the ways in which we engage them — this is not getting any better.

There’s a really excellent interview that Rachel Maddow did with John Stewart. It’s about 47 minutes long, and if you can hear it and have the time to listen to it, you should. One of the things he talks about is the 24 hour news cycle and how it hyper-dramatizes things, plays on our fears, and perpetuates the polarization and corruption in our system that allows it to thrive.

It’s exhausting. It’s a glut. And, if you’re old enough to remember a time before it, it’s not even a particularly skillful or useful glut. Worse, we’re not encouraged (or, if we are young, trained) to cultivate the discernment we need to differentiate between news-news and the opinion-makers on all sides who perpetuate the continued polarization of the national discourse.

In about a year, I’ll be spending more time than I like trying to explain to some of the otherwise intelligent adults in my life why the latest dumbshit political e-mail forward is a steaming pile of bunkum. I’m not looking forward to this any more than I am the fear and anger I experience when I see bumper stickers bearing the names of candidates who rally their base with rhetoric based on the idea that I am the enemy, that I am coming for them, and that should be harmed.

Closer to home in both time and space, I’m tired of this same rhetoric being used by causes and persons I support. I’m tired of the death of the distinction of fact versus opinion, of politically-motivated misinformation in the sciences, and of the way we are discouraged from picking through and finding the separate threads in complex situations instead of shouting (in 140 characters or less) that Julian Assange is Good/Bad and therefore cannot be a rapist/not a rapist/a hero/a terrorist/a lunatic/an idiot/a political prisoner.

You have one brain, and it is a magnificent tool. It is attached to your mouth, and to your heart. As a human being, I beg of you to apply these things to the best of your ability, and to encourage others (including me) to do the same with honesty, fairness, and kindness.

We will never agree on everything because the world is beautiful and strange and there is always more than one right answer depending on how you look. But oh, what I would give for just enough of us to cast off just enough cynicism to believe that these things can be a social good again.

Failing that, just put down the guns already. It isn’t helping.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com

Comments

[gone_fishing]

Very well said.

[natf]

*retweeted*

[bodlon]

Thanks for the RT!

I'm curious about why you regret the expiry of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Most of the powers encapsulated within them (deportation, naturalization) still exist in slightly different format, and the powers limiting speech were potentially problematic in terms of allowing citizens the right to criticize the government and/or are still considered unprotected speech (depending on the particular bit of speech in question). Could you clarify?

(Also, welcome. :D )

[natf]

Well, I only know about that act what I have read on DW and LJ, to be honest. It is so hard to say what you mean on Twitter, isn't it! What I mean is that at least in that act (from what I read) Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and other extremists would be held accountable for inciting violence against other USians. In the UK we are held accountable for what we say. There is no 'freedom of speech" here, as such (there is freedom of religion and the laws that mean that politicians deserve equal air-time) — you can, indeed, say whatever you want to say but if what you say can be seen to cause someone of low intelligence, poor mental health (or any other reason that they are easily persuaded) to commit such a heinous crime as the attack you refer to in your post, they may (should and will, I hope) be prosecuted for inciting the murders. It is a bit like I have seen in Law & Order (yeah, I know, fiction) that a company can be prosecuted in the US for second degree manslaughter if their product causes (or can be shown to not prevent…, in the case of something like a car that should have had safety measures to prevent…) a death. I would argue that Sarah Palin's blog and the cross-hairs image *could have* incited someone (this guy or any other person with a weapon - of which there are thankfully fewer in the UK than the US) to carry out an attack like that.

Wow - sorry - that got long. I may take this to a post on my LJ. Apologies for unpacking my brain on your DW!

[bodlon]

Maybe, maybe not. In a lot of ways I think the Tea Party is part of an ongoing conversation of sorts. Our laws about speech in the US are pretty fundamental to our culture, but by the same token I feel like how the law is actually constructed is different from public perception. That's tricky, because things like law and language mutate with that understanding over time. How we interpret the Constitution now and how we interpret it 50 years on either side of this date will be different.

I agree that many Tea Party candidates and adherents go well beyond what I'm comfortable with as an individual. They sell themselves a little with the prospect of armed rebellion, and I while I think I can understand some of where their philosophy comes from, I believe their platform is badly thought-out.

In a lot of ways, the Tea Party seems to draw some of the worst elements of various Right-wing and Libertarian movements that want to dismantle some of the progress we've made in terms of equality and social justice, and the anti-intellectual bias and conspiracy theory nonsense that some of their champions endorse makes me spit nails.

Really, it's like all of the cliches about American history got rolled up with paranoia and fear and started propagating itself by marketing with well-known/loved symbols. (Really! I can't describe how frustrated I am that the Tea Party has appropriated the Gadsden flag.)

The thing is, though, those ideas have a right to exist under our oldest laws. Those are laws that were created as a reaction against the system in the UK as it was applied in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. I've no doubt that some of those applications have shifted in the interim, but it's comforting to us, I think, to have it in writing that we can have unpopular ideas.

At their heart, I tend to think these principles are good in a John Stewart Mill kind of way, but I think too few of us over here have read On Liberty and are a little bit fuzzy on the concept of where their fists end and others' faces begin.

I need to do a second post, I think, about separating this ACTUAL case from the rhetoric -- in part because it's increasingly clear that the shooter is profoundly unwell -- but I think the point still stands. Where you incite hate and fear, where you declare someone the Other, people act on that. They shift their values, and they make choices that are at odds with kindness and community.

[natf]

Thank you for explaining it all!

[bodlon]

Oh, I'm sure that's not all of it. Just a bit of wittering without citation. ;)