Between Horror and Hope: on the 10th anniversary of the Tucson shooting
January 8th, 2021.
Today marks the tenth anniversary of the mass shooting at Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s “Congress on Your Corner” event in Tucson. Six people died, including 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, and more were left with lasting wounds, including Gabby, who to this day inspires us with her slow but constant victories over serious brain injury. I live in Gabby’s former Congressional District, showed up in front of her office that day to weep in the arms of friends — we prayed and sang together in front of University Hospital while an amazing surgical team saved her brain and life, and the lives of other victims. Before the tragedy, Gabby frequented the same cafés we did, listened to the same bands, was warm and accessible to all. She is still a bright light in our community — brighter every day. We congratulate her husband Mark Kelly on his new seat in the United States Senate.
In the House Gabby gracefully represented a swing district including very progressive and very conservative areas of southeastern Arizona — no easy job. Some of those who died in the shooting were Republican constituents who came to speak face-to-face with their Democratic Congresswoman; they trusted her to listen to their concerns because they knew her character.
Condolences poured in from around the country and the world. Republicans and Democrats pledged to “tone down the partisan rhetoric” (for a minute.) President Obama spoke in Tucson. A year later, when Gabby slowly made her way up to the dais at the Capitol to formally resign her office, no longer able to carry out her duties due to her injury, Republican House Speaker John Boehner wept openly. (Boehner became known for weeping frequently in his final days as Speaker, as a more openly right-wing faction gained control of his party.) There was barely a dry eye in the Capitol as Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Shultz read Gabby’s resignation letter for her. Ten years and many horrifying mass shootings later, we still have no progress on commonsense gun control laws in our nation.
The shooter that day, like the vast majority of mass shooters in recent decades, was a white man in his 20s and a fan of right-wing conspiracy theories. Nine months previous to the shooting, Sarah Palin’s campaign had posted a picture of Democratic candidates, including Gabby, with gun sight crosshairs over their faces. Following the shooting, Palin denied any responsibility in provoking violence.
Ten years later, almost to the day, as our members of Congress huddled in an undisclosed room for safety, beyond broken windows and toppled furniture, the House dais where Congresswoman Giffords offered her resignation was occupied by young white male conspiracy theorists for triumphant photo ops. Similar to events of 2011, Republican pundits condemned the violence toward our national Capitol on January 6th — some acknowledging President Trump’s rhetoric as instigating the mob — but none took responsibility for their own part in it. Not a one. Conservative news networks and radical-right media outlets immediately started to push theories, with no evidence, that it was actually left-wing antifa who broke into the Capitol. Like many others, Paul Ryan, who replaced Boehner as Speaker when the latter was seen as too “moderate” and “weak” to represent the party, came out of the woodwork to make a pretense of non-complicity in the violence.
Five people have died in the attack, including a police officer who made the ultimate sacrifice defending our national Capitol. And the Trumps call the attackers “patriots,” and send their “love.”
(Like you, I imagine, I am still riding an emotional rollercoaster; we’ve been on this ride for years but the loop-do-loop of this Wednesday has us all in shock. I’m doing my best to parse my thoughts for this essay from inside of this shock.)
The term “inflection point” is having an uptick in use these days. Maybe the most obvious example is that of George Floyd’s murder, when a critical mass was finally reached of white Americans who were willing to go out on the streets and say that the existing situation is intolerable, and to begin to self-educate about racism in America.
Many major events in our nation’s recent history have been potential inflection points. When the Twin Towers fell in 2001, the international community and every United State responded with love and support for New York’s grief and shock. There was a huge outpouring of sympathy and a feeling of community. Many of us hoped the obvious hope that this horrible event could be met with a similarly positive political responses to the terrorist act; the United States had been violated on our own soil, and we could have used those feeling of vulnerability and concern for our neighbors toward more compassionate domestic policy and stronger international relations. The Bush Administration took the opposite approach, and succumbed to terror with hypermilitaristic security measures and unilateral foreign policy — we went to war. But we the People remember that time, when “every American was a New Yorker,” and our impulse was to draw closer to each other rather than pushing farther apart.
In January of 2011 Tucson’s tragedy was all over the news. Something extraordinary happened. When approached by the news media, those interviewed almost universally spoke in positive language of love, healing, community, and the desire for this kind of tragedy to never happen again. There was no talk of retribution, bitterness, division, fear of more violence… even the perpetrator’s name was barely mentioned because we didn’t want to give him the celebrity. Reporters pressed interviewees for sensational emotionalism, and were repeatedly surprised by the gentle and positive responses of Tucsonans. I was so proud of our town.
Since then so many communities have faced similar tragedies and met them positively, such as with the youth movement that grew from the 2018 Parkland shooting. Our impulse as humans is to help each other, and to make things better for each other when we can. Self preservation is an impulse as well, but in the heat of the moment we see our true humanity; the shooter in Tucson, like many other shooters, was taken to the ground by unarmed everyday people risking their own lives, and in recovery communities have pulled together over and over.
This week our Capitol was breached by domestic terrorists, many illegally armed, who had been incited to riot by a lying wannabe strongman tyrant, fed for years a steady, emotionally triggering diet of misinformation and false conspiracy theories, and psychologically groomed to be ready to act out on command. Wednesday’s event has been called a coup, but it’s not — it’s one clumsy, tasteless, insulting dramatic act in a long, slow, truly pernicious coup that has been attempting to destabilize our democracy for decades.
Again, we’re at an inflection point. Everyone with eyes could see the glaring contrast in police response Wednesday with that of the summer BLM protests. Everyone got to watch the perpetrators walk unmolested out of our Capitol building after vandalizing our property and taking selfies with their crimes. A Confederate flag flew in our Capitol. And the whole drama was incited by our sitting President.
And already there is the pull to normalize this news, because four years with Donald Trump, and decades of regressive governance by the hostile right wing of a minority party, have beaten us into normalizing horrific news. After years of cognitive dissonance it is the predictable response of a victim of abuse.
But in these days following this abominable act against the symbol of our Republic, we need to hold fast to clear eyed, open hearted, intelligent, rational, tough love for our country. We have been violated, and the violation must stop. Now. Crimes against the State have been committed; for the sake of our national security, the integrity of our justice system, and the precedents we must set for future governance, we must respond with swift justice.
In the ancient Greek, whose thought our Framers studied to create our Constitution, the word we usually translate as “justice” also means something like “integrity.” In our current punitive, militaristic, litigious American justice system we’ve come to think of justice as retribution or punishment. Let’s entertain a bigger definition.
The criminals who attacked our Capitol, and those who trained, enabled, and instigated them, must be brought to justice — they must be apprehended, prevented from doing more harm, and tried by courts of law. This is in motion, and we will keep it in motion with our attention to the matter.
Another part of justice that you and I can play, and are playing, is that of bringing our country back to integrity. The people of Georgia are doing it and brought us the victories of Senators Warnock and Ossoff. The big-tent party of basic human decency has taken control of Washington from the minority party and will work fast to restabilize our democracy — our part is to hold them to their word, support their work, and trust their expertise and wisdom as they face the tattered mess they’ve been left.
We, the people, are possibly the most critical actors right now for the integrity of this great and imperfect democratic experiment. Our Republic has survived a long, slow attack, and we who have woken up to our part in it need to stay engaged from here forward. And I’m not saying any of us needs to be a hero or sacrifice our happiness for it — we are all in this together as one big body with multiple strengths and skills. We are registering massive numbers of voters, activating activists, inspiring each other, and we have amazingly bright, strong, energetic new generations coming up who recognize their importance and power. And we have the best music!
Today, and tomorrow, and for as long as it takes, we need to hold our administration to immediately invoking the 25th Amendment to secure our institutions of government, and our members of Congress to impeachment proceedings if Pence and the rest of Trump’s cabinet fail us. This is our immediate task at hand; call and email your members of Congress and the White House. Now. Tell them how you feel and ask how you can help.
Please stay safe, be well, and know that we’re stronger and wiser than any terrorists. The vast majority of people in this country are fundamentally decent. We have an awesome, awesome democratic system that will respond to us to the degree we participate in it, and we are just beginning to do that on the level required for these times. Our future is bright, people.