Unimaginable Tragedy?

Rachel Maddow did a segment of her show on Monday night about some of the troublesome things cropping up in the coverage of the mass shooting and assassination attempt in Arizona this weekend. When the clip is up, I may post it--frankly, I'd like to post the whole show--but for now, I'd just like to agree with one of her points. No matter how you see the tragedy, it was not unimaginable or inconceivable. In fact, it is sadly too common for these kinds of shooting sprees to happen in America. We rarely seem to have a year without one. What is different about this one, is that a Congresswoman was at the center of it, rather than the victims being essentially random targets. But that too was conceivable and imaginable.

We still do not know the motivation--other than probable mental illness--of the shooter. But I can't be the only one who thought something like this might happen, particularly late into the 2008 presidential election, and then on into the town hall shout-fests. There was a rising climate of not just anger, but unfocused, frothing, boiling over rage. In my opinion, given the vagueness of much of the rhetoric, it was ginned up rage, but it was rage just the same. I worried about the President's safety, and also for some of the more prominently--excuse the term--targeted members of the House and Senate. So yes, I've been expecting (and dreading) that something like this could happen.

It could turn out that this Jarod Loughner guy is just bonkers, and that his brain is a stew of outrageous political ideas, real and imagined. He could have been more influenced by extreme right-wingers or extreme left-wingers (though they are much harder to find).  But there can be no denying that the flames have been vigorously fanned in the last couple of years by prominent politicians and pundits. And the next crazy shooter might be listening.

[Excerpt]

Climate of Hate

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen? . . .

Read more at: New York Times