Hello, and welcome. Please pardon the mess while I set up the new blog, but the events that occurred in Arizona this weekend moved me to finally join the the Internet noise machine and try to be heard above the din.
What is now known is that a man named Jared Lee Loughner attended a public event being held by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D. AZ). He then allegedly pulled out a Glock semi-automatic pistol that he had previously purchased legally and opened fire, killing Justice John Roll (63), Christina Taylor Green (9, born 9/11/01), Gifford's community outreach director Gabe Zimmerman (30), Phyllis Schneck (79), Dorothy Morris (76), and Dorwin Stoddard (76), whose last act was to shield his wife from the hail of gunfire. The gunman also critically wounded Rep. Giffords, her chief of staff Ron Barber, aide Pam Simon, Stoddard's wife and ten other people, before being subdued by four bystanders, at least one of whom, a 74 year old retired army colonel, was also among the wounded.
Almost immediately, the noise machine went into its now natural state - overdrive. Many (but nowhere near all) on the left have leapt up to fling the blame at the feet of the vitriolic, eliminationist rhetoric coming out of the mainstreamed extreme right. Meanwhile, those same vitriolic voices so accused have predictably washed their hands of any personal responsibility (irony!) for their routinely violent language[1]. Some, at least, have thankfully tried to point out that Loughner's politics are irrelevant. Even if he was not mentally unbalanced, which he clearly was, it doesn't matter if he considered himself D or R. Gunfire is an unacceptable form of communication.
And while little information has come out about the gunman, it is clear that his actions were the product of a very dysfunctional brain. Nothing more, nothing less. Posts and videos attributed to him are paranoid and incoherent, and it is difficult to parse anything from them, let alone a political leaning.
But even that seems to me to be ignoring a larger point that so far I have only seen Harry Shearer touch on - that we used to have a public mental health care system in this country, flawed as it may have been. As Shearer notes, the system had its problems. Those problems were used to lead the charge to shut the system down. The argument was made that they should be replaced by local, community mental health centers that would "provide better care." Well, the system was shut down, but the community centers never materialized.
Of course, they never materialized because those kinds of systems are difficult to maintain and fund in a decentralized fashion. One of the things our Federal government is supposed to do is fund and maintain the large, centralized systems required to operate things the public needs, but that private industry cannot, will not, or should not be operating in a for profit manner.
It seems to me we are faced with a choice in this country. Yes there is much to be said for "rugged individualism," for pulling one's self up by the bootstraps. But there is also something to be said for looking out for one another. And while we can and should do that on an individual basis, to really be effective in a meaningful way, much of this "looking out for each other" needs to be managed at a federal level. Which in turn means it needs to be paid for. I know taxes are a burden, and money is tight, but for my own part I do not begrudge the money I am forcibly parted with to care for other people who are strangers to me. Some of them might be trying to unfairly game the system, but most are not. I do not begrudge this because there may come a day when I need to avail myself of those same services.
Those taxes I pay also go for things I'm not terribly happy to be paying for, but that comes with the territory. I fear that in our current political climate, we will have to go back to old and poor people dying in the streets in droves before we remember why we decided we needed better social support systems.
Benjamin Franklin once said "We must, indeed, hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately." He spoke those words to the Second Continental Congress, to urge the bickering body to put their grievances aside and unite behind a desperate, controversial and contentious act -- declaring that we were no longer going to answer to the mightiest monarch on the planet, but that we would make our own way. Then, as now, many disagreed vehemently about who we were as a nation. But Franklin's point is as valid now as it was then -- if we let our differences divide us, if we refuse to come together collectively for each others' sakes, our doom is certain. Without question.
There is no way to know if having a public mental health system would have prevented Mr. Loughner's tragic act of violence. And we have no way to guarantee that some of the same problems that plagued the old system wouldn't still exist in any new public mental health system. And, of course, we can't really have a public mental health system in this country without having a public health system.
But I refuse to accept that those problems mean the whole issue is intractable. That government is incompetent and cannot be trusted to provide public services. Certainly private business is no less corrupt, incompetent and incapable of providing a public service - they are by definition at odds to such a thing. The whole point about public services is that they need to be public. Many of them are difficult to make a profit on, and generally when a profit can be made in such circumstances, it is of a predatory nature or of questionable ethics. I'll take some government over none, and certainly over unfettered, unregulated free-for-all-enterprise.
We're clearly having some serious problems getting along with each other and trying to do things together. But if we don't start looking out for each other, if we continue down this "every man for himself" path we seem to have set ourselves upon, most assuredly we will all hang separately.
h/t to Brooke for the post title
[1] UPDATE: When I started writing this blog post this morning, Fox News' front page seemed to have thrown down the gauntlet about their right to be unrepentantly appalling, and the whole splash page took a hyper-defensive tone. Now the entire tenor of their coverage has toned down considerably. Even Glenn Beck has released an "open letter" that seems quite reasonable.
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