Trapped in Atlanta with finally some time and space to write a blog or two (how long has it been?) At the risk of sounding like a lot of others, I’ll toss in my two cents about the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the murder of Judge John Roll and five others.
Words have consequences. As a student of history, I’ll cite the powerful examples of Nazi Germany and pre-Genocide Rwanda. Call Jews vermin or Tutsi cockroaches long enough, and people get the picture–extermination. Label your opponents, foreigners and communists or place them between figurative cross-hairs and people get the picture too.
As is usually the case, the merchants of the greatest invective will now claim that they had nothing to do with it. That their words are just words and only an unbalanced person would take those words seriously. At the most outrageous, they’ll parrot Ann’s Coulter’s fallacy that assassins are all left wing types–never conservatively minded. As Rep. Gifford herself forewarned and as I wrote some time ago fearing that this type of violence would claim the president, in a country with our history of political violence, permissive attitude towards firearms, and culture of civic resistance the past risks becoming the future. History is only a lesson if we in fact learn from it. Otherwise it is a turned page, never memorized and left open the interpretation by demagogues who use the past for their own immediate ends. We’ve seen it before and we are seeing it again.
