Unarmed?

“We came unarmed – this time,” multiple 9/12 protest signs threatened during a demonstration in D.C.

Well, next time came.

A man carrying a loaded gun in a thick swarm of people at a town hall meeting opened fire on his Congresswoman entering the building.

He pleaded guilty, but he wanted the jury to understand that he was under overwhelming stress: He had just lost his job, had been consuming a great deal of junk food because he could not afford anything else, and he needed them to understand that he was just defending the people of this republic as well as their Constitution.

“I too share your fear of crazy, lone nut-jobs,” Glenn Beck claimed on his Fox show last Friday.

But the problem here reaches deeper than the solo-quack.

It may only take one person to go off the deep end and harm the image of a movement, but isn’t society as a whole, or at least in part, responsible for the creation of circumstances and a mood that contributes to such an individual’s actions?

Yes. Yes it is.

Beyond society at large, individuals who reach out to these nuts by prying on their emotions with key words and red-white-and-blue arguments are to be faulted as well.
When a source claiming credibility incites violence through racism, genuine suggestions and stupidity, the informed audience cannot help but qualm with the calm assurance such a “news source” offers through these suggestions.

“I have concerns about some of the language that is being used,” said Nancy Pelosi, choked up regarding the violence in her weekly press conference last Thursday.

She referenced a political situation similar to our current one that ultimately resulted in the murder of Harvey Milk in the 1970s. “This kind of rhetoric is just, is really frightening and it created a climate in which ... violence took place and ... I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made,” she said.

The encouragement of violence is not difficult to find.

Noosed effigies of the president and government officials, hateful, disgusting and terrifying signs and loaded guns at town hall meetings – all of these actions speak louder than words. They speak a not-so-subtle truth about the individuals involved in them.

However, they do more than speak. They scream.

They scream for one idiot who goes too far.

It’s only a matter of time in the current atmosphere of hate-speech, unacceptable intolerance and fact-twisting before a fringe element explodes – like a sole bottle rocket that flies into someone’s face.

Just when we let our guard down, just when America begins to get used to the crack-crack-crackling fireworks of repulsive animosity, that is when one bursts in someone’s face.

This may not be someone we know personally, but we should know them as a person; and for those of use who do, it will hurt. It will hurt because the pain of sympathy is an emotion greater and more meaningful than those feelings fear-mongered into us again and again, by those too “concerned” to take a moment for real concern.

And to the one individual who is finally hurt, I can only hope that society can offer a warm embrace.

And from the individuals asinine enough to continue setting off the fireworks, I can only hope that society as a whole will finally begin to turn their backs.

From the posters of one who knew hatred in an extraordinary way, Harvey Milk: “Don’t let it happen here.”