Raising Arizona

Yesterday at 1:59pm EST I posted a CNN update to my Facebook profile. “Several Shot at Tucson Grocery”. As the day wore on more facts became known and the numbers of dead and wounded grew. Bad enough that a US congresswoman was targeted; bad enough that a federal judge was killed; bad enough that a beautiful nine-year-old girl lost her life. The final tally of six dead and fourteen wounded was a knife in the heart of all Americans of conscience, no matter their political affiliation. At this moment, Representative Giffords lies in intensive care, struggling to recover from a critical injury. Other families are mourning their dead or sitting vigil beside other bedsides, and all of us are trying to make sense of a senseless act. Of course, spin doctors on the right and the left are wasting no time in trying to put this tragedy in context, but in reality there can be no context for such an act. It stands on its own in all its obscene useless sensational ugliness. Context? That is almost as stupid a word as “closure” and as irrelevant to to this situation.

Major media outlets are covering this assassination attack exhaustively. Websites such as Huffington Post have posted minute-by-minute updates on both the victims and the shooter. Bloggers with exponentially more followers than I have are frantically posting and tweeting and inventing new hashtags to cover all the details of the shooting. Conspiracy theorists are parsing Jared Loughner’s Youtube videos and trying to draw lines of connection from him to various anti-American groups. In the midst of it all, I am bemused by the normality of the world around me – my world, not the larger world of politics and terrorism and schizophrenia and brain surgery, but the tiny world that is important to me, swirling around me with joy and chaos and anger over broken toys and spilled juice. My husband, my kids, my relatives near and far. As I’m watching the world change yet again my two year old runs up and demands a cracker. My oldest son takes a break from his computer game to get a glass of water, and the baby at my feet smiles as he gnaws on my pants leg until it is soggy with drool. They ignore the TV coverage, more interested in Tuff Puppy and Spongebob. They know nothing about politics or mental illness; they only care that Mommy said they could eat the crackers I’d had stashed away for school snacks.

I’m keenly aware of the blessings in my life, of the luxury of being able to complain about small things like a stain on the carpet or a toilet that won’t stop running. The families of the dead and wounded in Arizona would rush to take my place, would be overjoyed to deal with such mundane complaints instead of preparing for a marathon of hospitals and rehab, or grief and funerals. And touched as I am by the pain of this attack, all too soon I turn away from the TV to make a meal, do a load of laundry, play peekaboo or help my son prepare for his spelling bee. My life, simple as it is, goes on.

I called UMC Tucson, the hospital where Rep. Giffords is being treated, asking for some information. Swamped as they are with media requests from actual media personnel, the lady in charge of media relations was kind enough to call me back, puzzled no doubt as to who I was, calling with no credentials and no title other than “blogger”. I was asking if any babies had been born at the hospital yesterday. The charge nurse had previously told me yes before handing off my request, and the media relations lady promised to try to find out more details and get back to me. Kind of her, indeed. I’m sure she’s not getting any sleep tonight. Maybe she’ll be able to wedge me in between Greta van Susteren and Wolf Blitzer.

Why am I interested in the babies that were born at that hospital yesterday? Well, perhaps it’s a bit of the old “circle of life” thing. These babies, these little boys and girls, are going to inherit the world that we give to them. As six lives have ended, their lives are just beginning, and we have a duty to them to try to improve the situation that they are being born into. It’s not just the violence and the polarized politics and anti-immigration fervor. It’s the underlying anger and incivility that allows these topics to take over our society. We have got to get a handle on it and figure out how to talk to one another without drawing lines in the sand or putting huge chips on our shoulders, daring with jutting chins for anyone to knock them off. I’m not naive; I know that the hatemongers out there are not going to be silent and they are not going to go away. But the rest of us can marginalize them if we refuse to by into their “us-vs-them” mentality. I went to the grocery store the other day and managed to make it all the way from produce to dairy to the freezer section and out to the checkstand without ever asking anyone’s political affiliation. The lady bagging my groceries didn’t ask “paper or plastic”; nor did she ask “Democrat or Republican”. The guy gathering carts didn’t ask to see my citizenship papers, and when I pulled up to a red light on the way out of the parking lot, no one cut me off and cussed me out because I’m driving an import. We manage to get along in our everyday lives; why the hell can’t we get along in our political and public lives? I guess I’m echoing Jon Stewart now and his image of cars merging into traffic that was played at the Rally to Restore Sanity. It was high time for that rally and God willing we can bring the message from that day back into the public consciousness. If we are going to survive as a nation, we have got to stop sniping at each other and start figuring out how to put our big boy and big girl pants on and work together.

So, where do we go from here? Most of us will turn off the TV and watch a little football or work on our taxes, make sure the kids have clean socks for school in the morning or double check the weather forecast and pray for no more snow. In the morning we’ll check for updates and shake our heads and tsk tsk about the horror of it all while we eat a bran muffin and drink a cup of coffee and complain about the new Starbucks logo. We’ll get stuck in traffic or head for the home office or sleep late if we’re one of the millions of unemployed. We’ll spare a kind thought for the victims and even shed some honestly sympathetic tears, then we’ll get on with our lives. Life goes on…. Let’s just promise ourselves that we’ll do a bit more in our lives to reach out to others, to see people instead of labels, talk to instead of at people, and realize that someone who is a Republican, or a Democrat, or – gasp! – a Libertarian, is first and foremost a person, a human being worthy of the respect of civilized contact. I’ll even refrain from closing my blog post with something snarky about Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. At least tonight.