come together

Most remarkable in Sarah Palin's response to the furor over the shooting in Arizona and the subsequent blame game played in the aftermath was that she attempted to separate almost everything and everyone. We are individuals, she explains; it is not a city that committed the crime, only the shooter; anyone who tries to share the blame is practicing blood something or other....

The key message or perhaps her subtext was that we do not commit crimes and we should not be held responsible for the unexplainable actions of a madman. This is true, I suppose, to a point.

On the other hand, almost everyone has suggested that we should come together to grieve and share our grief. We as a country will heal from this, we will pray together... So the grieving is a group activity, but the blame should not be shared? Part of what makes us human is that we recognize that when another person suffers, we suffer. This is called empathy. I think blame can be shared too.

In fact, Palin and her two buddies from the right have been trying to share the blame of extremist rhetoric with her opponents on the left. They did it too, so I am not to blame for my cross hairs on the woman who now has been taken off a breathing machine and is delicately holding up her two fingers in either a peace sign or a victory signal.

But while they want to share blame put on them by others, they want to suggest that any connections made by their opponents are part of a persecutory witch hunt. When anyone attempts to ask Palin or Limbaugh to take on some of the guilt and sin of a fellow human being, their reaction is that we are persecuting them.... Metaphorically, she is tying this blaming of her (an innocent bystander) to the blame put on the Jews. In a sense, we are supposed to see her as one of them.

And yet, juxtaposed against this trope of common suffering, she stands by the core of every libertarian. One of the primary philosophies of the libertarian right is an Emersonian "I am a rock, I am an island" (Simonian?) view of man. Americans have often fallen back on this kind of 'go it alone' view for many years, and that approach to the world is strongest in parts of the country where people are most fiercely independent- the wild west.

New information about the killer from Tucson tells a classic story of growing independence leading to its sinister brother: alienation. He was apparently a very nice kid who slowly moved from being a saxophone player in a band to a guy who played dark and nerdy games with friends to a guy no one wanted to play with anymore. One of his old friends said it made him nervous when he would invite him to go out into the desert to shoot guns. People started to make excuses, and the girls didn't really want to date him any more. It is of course counter-intuitive for us to begin to understand and sympathize with a person like him. However, being human means being empathetic. One of the chilling reports was from a neighbor of the family- they said if a ball rolled into their yard, they'd leave it there rather than retrieve it. Bad vibes they all said. They were the Radleys of Macomb.

I have had neighbors like this, and I have known people who have begun to alienate themselves and allow the drift of uneasiness into their lives. These people have been allowed to become islands, not because they are powerful Emersonian idealists, or Nietzschean Ubermench, but because they find it easier to be on their own than to deal with others.

Sarah Palin's instincts that come from an anti-socialist ideology right out of an Ayn Rand novel are demonstrated by her remarks in which she distances herself from the shooter. Rush Limbaugh continued to help draw out this distance by pointing out that Sarah Palin was no where near Tucson on the day of the shooting.

Of course, many people with less ice in their veins have begun to feel guilty that they did nothing to stop this horrible event. The cop who pulled the shooter over for going through a red light, the taxi driver who drove him to the store, a friend who knew him when.... all these people who came into contact with him will now begin to ask a simple question- how could I have made a difference?

This is about a shared humanity. We are guilty of this attack, because another human committed the atrocity. Just as I would feel guilty if a member of my family caused a tragedy, and if it were a member of my town, I would feel some remorse, we can all feel a trace of guilt in the things that went down that day in the sun drenched parking lot of a Tucson grocery store.

Palin is desperately trying to distance herself from this event. I'm sure the NRA will have no comment on the event for quite some time. Many gun owners are running as fast as they can from this event to buy bigger clips for their guns in fear that the 30bullet clips may be outlawed. Perhaps they can all get together at the doorway of their local gun shop to say a prayer for the victims.

But instead, most will buy more guns so that they can feel safer (though statistically this is idiocy), more bullets so they can keep themselves safer. Protecting oneself by clinging to one's Glock is not really the best way to "come together." I'll leave you all with one more Beatle's lyric: "Happiness is a Warm Gun."