Emotions are seldom more pronouced than when a child disapears. Depending on the news cycle, word that a baby, toddler or even a pre-teen is missing can rally a nation in the hope that all will be well and the fear that it won't. Five-year old Jahessye (Jessie) Shockley is one such case.
The smiling, bright-eyed, little girl with a smile as wide as bright as the future she deserves was last seen at her Glendale, Arizona, apartment on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon. Her mother, Jerice Hunter, tearfully told police she had only left Jahessye for a few minutes in the care of her 13-year old sister. Police responded with a mobile command center, hundreds of officers and volunteers working a three-mile radius search of the area, canvassing homes and parking lots, asking neighbors and strangers in the area if they had seen this beautiful little girl. Their only lead, so far, is a witness report that a child matching Jahessye's description was seen that afternoon getting into a late-model dark chevy sedan, maybe a Malibu.
But the news cycle ground on and this was just not enough to keep this story going so enterprising reporters started digging, asking police about Jahessye's parents, Jerice in Arizona and George Shockley, in California. What they found would fuel another day or two of stories and speculation. Jerice was convicted, and sent to prison, in 2006, for beating her other children with extension cords and sticks. George Shockley is a registered sex offender and is currently doing time in prison. While police admit they are aware of these facts, they continue to say neither parent is a suspect in Jahessye's disappearance.
What police are saying is that they now believe Jahessye was kidnapped by a person or persons yet unknown and a $11,000 reward is now being offered. Jahessye's grandmother, Jerice's mother, is leading neighbors in vigils and is raising her voice to police and community leaders, asking why more is not being done to find her beautiful grandaughter. She's even marching on the state capitol to call even more attention to the fact that, after more than a week, no one has any idea where her Jahessye is.
It remains to be seen just how this case will be resolved. Will Jahessye be found alive? Will she be discovered to be the victim of a kidnapping? Will she be discovered dead, killed by a friend, family or a stranger as is all too often the case? One thing is crystal clear: this little girl did nothing to deserve her fate and it is tragic in the extreme that she is still missing. Someone out there knows what has happened to her and police need to redouble their efforts to find her.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Susan Brock Sentenced but Society is Still at Large
Sitting in the Maricopa County Superior Courtroom, I could think of little but my own 12-year old son as I heard the Pinal County Prosecutor reel off in graphic detail the sexual atrocities committed against a 14-year old boy by Susan Brock, the wife of Maricopa County Supervisor Fulton Brock sentenced this month to 13 years in prison for her admitted crimes. I watched her as she sat at the Defense counsel's table, in her zebra-striped couty jail garb, flanked on the right by mounds of expensive toys and electronics that she had given to the victim to buy his submission to her own depraved and deviant sexual desires. The methodical and patient manipulation of this boy into sex acts with a woman old enough to be his mother and then her ability to make him feel in some way responsible for them made my stomach turn even as I struggled to keep an objective view as I was reporting this for my day job.
But there's more. Revealed in the evidence at sentencing was audio of jailhouse phone calls between Susan and her husband Fulton Brock, a prominent resident of my own city of Chandler, laughing and joking, talking about trying for a pardon from the Governor, disparaging the character of the victim, even as he put out press releases about how terrible his wife's crimes were, how he had to divorce her and about how sick she must be as a human being for hurting this boy in such a heinous and immoral manner.
Wait, there's even more. Revealed in those same calls was information that prominent leaders in the Mormon Church, the faith folllowed by the Brock's and the victim, knew of the crimes and they did nothing to inform law enforcement, instead trying to handle it between the Brock's and the victim's family.
Hold on, there's even more. Fulton and Susan Brock's daughter, Rachel, who is attending college is also charged with molesting the same victim but pleads "not guilty." It's hard to say where the evil and disgust of this "family affair" begins, ends or is most eggregious but what is certain is that it points out the ongoing and endemic problem we have in this society: that of valuing the lives of our innocent children less than we do the lives of the adults who victimize them.
This devaluation begins in utero as we continue the neverending debate about the ethics and morality of abortion. While not arguing one side or the other, it does give us the reductio ad absurdum argument that belies the fundamental truth behind the coarsening of our artitudes toward children: where do the rights of children equal or exceed those of adults (if ever) and do those rights diminish or increase proportionally with age? It is obvious that a child's rights do increase with age as the baby about to emerge from the birth canal has almost no rights as s/he is still considered to be "unborn" while the moment the child is born, s/he is a baby and enjoys the full protection of the law. As a society, we have chosen an arbitrary, if definitive, boundary. That span of seconds between unborn and born makes all the difference and if society can draw so sharp a distinction then it can blur the lines just as easily.
Some states have passed laws to protect the lives of the unborn, such as those that count the killing of a fetus in the killing or attempted killing of a pregnant woman as murder, but that same child is still nothing but tissue to be discarded if that pregnant woman herself decides that it is so. So we must ask ourselves, in that instance, if the law is really protecting the rights of the child or of the mother.
Once the child is born and s/he enjoys the protection of the law, that protection still is predominantly enjoyed by the parents or other adults far more than by said child. Some would argue this is nnecessary to allow parents and elders the authority they need to protect, guide, and exercise responsibility over their children, but that very authority is all too often turned against the children and used by adults to further injure them. One need only remember the Catholic Priest Pedophile Scandal, or watch the news to see teachers, preachers. politicians and entertainers sexually or physically abuse the children who trusted them and who were comdemned to subordination to them by the law.
Of course, in some cases the pendulum has swung far to the other side with over-zealous adults who, in a search for their own empowerment, see molesters and violent abusers where there are none and innocent people are forever tarred and feathered, but those are rare cases and are overwhelmed by the number of real cases of abuse that are reported to authorities. But what of those that are not reported? In the Susan Brock case, the abuse lasted for years because it was not violent, there were no obviious outward signs and the boy was made to feel as though it were his idea and any physical pleasure he may have felt in the acts merely served to further ensnare him in her web of guilt and sin. How many movies or TV shows have we seen where the younger man is "schooled" in the ways of love by the experienced older woman? How many stories have we heard of "Lolitias" luring older men into sex? Society sexualizes these children and then wonders why these things happen.
Susan Brock could to this because society not only allows it, it encourages it. We sexualize our children at a very young age and we celebrate said sexuality through toddler beauty pageants and sexed-up TV shows depicting high school kides getting pregnant ot losing their virginity in bouts of underaged drinking. We have reality shows, like Toddlers and Tiaras and 16 and Pregnant and dramas like Skins and The Secret Life of the American Teenager that glamorize the sexualization and sexuality of minors. Millions of dollars are made in the entertainment industry showing us that kids are sexual objects and perhaps billions of dollars are made through the merchandising and marketing that results from that media onslaught pushing kids across America to buy the products (clothes, makeup, etc...) they believe they need to help them achieve that themselves. It is a vicious cycle, powered by money and abetted by a voracious appetite for sex.
None of this is to absolve Susan Brock, Fulton Brock, Rachel Brock or the Mormon Church of any guilt they may share in the destruction of this boy's life. Each is answering, or will have to answer, for the roles they played in this tragedy. The victim is forever scarred, forever wounded by this theft of his innocence. Children abused like this often become sexually confused, socially inept and even suicidal.
But there is another side to this tragedy and that is the self-immolation of the Brock family. They had everything we are told a family needs in order to be successful: money, careers, faith, values, fellowship and all kept within a beautiful home and surrounded by a white picket fence. but like all facades, theirs was thin and brittle and what little there was that was solid was eaten through by their own decadence. And it all came crumbling down.
But there's more. Revealed in the evidence at sentencing was audio of jailhouse phone calls between Susan and her husband Fulton Brock, a prominent resident of my own city of Chandler, laughing and joking, talking about trying for a pardon from the Governor, disparaging the character of the victim, even as he put out press releases about how terrible his wife's crimes were, how he had to divorce her and about how sick she must be as a human being for hurting this boy in such a heinous and immoral manner.
Wait, there's even more. Revealed in those same calls was information that prominent leaders in the Mormon Church, the faith folllowed by the Brock's and the victim, knew of the crimes and they did nothing to inform law enforcement, instead trying to handle it between the Brock's and the victim's family.
Hold on, there's even more. Fulton and Susan Brock's daughter, Rachel, who is attending college is also charged with molesting the same victim but pleads "not guilty." It's hard to say where the evil and disgust of this "family affair" begins, ends or is most eggregious but what is certain is that it points out the ongoing and endemic problem we have in this society: that of valuing the lives of our innocent children less than we do the lives of the adults who victimize them.
This devaluation begins in utero as we continue the neverending debate about the ethics and morality of abortion. While not arguing one side or the other, it does give us the reductio ad absurdum argument that belies the fundamental truth behind the coarsening of our artitudes toward children: where do the rights of children equal or exceed those of adults (if ever) and do those rights diminish or increase proportionally with age? It is obvious that a child's rights do increase with age as the baby about to emerge from the birth canal has almost no rights as s/he is still considered to be "unborn" while the moment the child is born, s/he is a baby and enjoys the full protection of the law. As a society, we have chosen an arbitrary, if definitive, boundary. That span of seconds between unborn and born makes all the difference and if society can draw so sharp a distinction then it can blur the lines just as easily.
Some states have passed laws to protect the lives of the unborn, such as those that count the killing of a fetus in the killing or attempted killing of a pregnant woman as murder, but that same child is still nothing but tissue to be discarded if that pregnant woman herself decides that it is so. So we must ask ourselves, in that instance, if the law is really protecting the rights of the child or of the mother.
Once the child is born and s/he enjoys the protection of the law, that protection still is predominantly enjoyed by the parents or other adults far more than by said child. Some would argue this is nnecessary to allow parents and elders the authority they need to protect, guide, and exercise responsibility over their children, but that very authority is all too often turned against the children and used by adults to further injure them. One need only remember the Catholic Priest Pedophile Scandal, or watch the news to see teachers, preachers. politicians and entertainers sexually or physically abuse the children who trusted them and who were comdemned to subordination to them by the law.
Of course, in some cases the pendulum has swung far to the other side with over-zealous adults who, in a search for their own empowerment, see molesters and violent abusers where there are none and innocent people are forever tarred and feathered, but those are rare cases and are overwhelmed by the number of real cases of abuse that are reported to authorities. But what of those that are not reported? In the Susan Brock case, the abuse lasted for years because it was not violent, there were no obviious outward signs and the boy was made to feel as though it were his idea and any physical pleasure he may have felt in the acts merely served to further ensnare him in her web of guilt and sin. How many movies or TV shows have we seen where the younger man is "schooled" in the ways of love by the experienced older woman? How many stories have we heard of "Lolitias" luring older men into sex? Society sexualizes these children and then wonders why these things happen.
Susan Brock could to this because society not only allows it, it encourages it. We sexualize our children at a very young age and we celebrate said sexuality through toddler beauty pageants and sexed-up TV shows depicting high school kides getting pregnant ot losing their virginity in bouts of underaged drinking. We have reality shows, like Toddlers and Tiaras and 16 and Pregnant and dramas like Skins and The Secret Life of the American Teenager that glamorize the sexualization and sexuality of minors. Millions of dollars are made in the entertainment industry showing us that kids are sexual objects and perhaps billions of dollars are made through the merchandising and marketing that results from that media onslaught pushing kids across America to buy the products (clothes, makeup, etc...) they believe they need to help them achieve that themselves. It is a vicious cycle, powered by money and abetted by a voracious appetite for sex.
None of this is to absolve Susan Brock, Fulton Brock, Rachel Brock or the Mormon Church of any guilt they may share in the destruction of this boy's life. Each is answering, or will have to answer, for the roles they played in this tragedy. The victim is forever scarred, forever wounded by this theft of his innocence. Children abused like this often become sexually confused, socially inept and even suicidal.
But there is another side to this tragedy and that is the self-immolation of the Brock family. They had everything we are told a family needs in order to be successful: money, careers, faith, values, fellowship and all kept within a beautiful home and surrounded by a white picket fence. but like all facades, theirs was thin and brittle and what little there was that was solid was eaten through by their own decadence. And it all came crumbling down.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Egypt's Undoing: Opportunity or Crisis
After more than a week of live coverage showing Molotov cocktails, hurled stones, armored vehicles, and screaming protesters using corrugated sheeting reminiscent of the shields Roman legions used to conquer the nation on the Nile more than 2,000 years ago, the cameras are dark or gone completely from their perches high above Cairo's Tahrir Square. CNN's Anderson Cooper, just one of the many journalists assaulted by the crowds as pernicious rumors of Western conspiracies to yet again subsume another populist uprising in the Middle East to the realpolitik of economics and oil spreads like a pestilence through the pro and anti-Mubarak demonstrators, is now hiding in subdued lighting and almost whispering into the microphone to avoid detection. This is Egypt, cradle of ancient civilization and home to the only remaining wonder of the ancient world. It is also the climax of what appears to be the largest revolution in the region since the end of World War II.
People can only be oppressed for so long and the corrupt governments that are the rule in the region are each bearing the brunt of what looks to be near simultaneous eruptions of independence and reform stretching from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the Persian Gulf, the perfect storm of political discord. Egyptians, especially, are acting as though they have been unbound and are free for the first time in more than three decades to truly speak their minds and to defend themselves against the forces that would stifle them, even at the barrel of a gun or crack of the whip held by pro-Mubarak camel cavalry.
But, now that the pictures have stopped streaming from the epicenter of this evolution in Middle Eastern politics, we must ask ourselves what is next. As the violence has ratcheted up, the transparency on both sides of this conflict has become more clouded. We have video of demonstrators announcing their hatred of the West and their contempt for the apparent slowness of action from President Barack Obama, the man they put so much faith in as he traveled to Cairo in 2009, telling the people there that America sympathized with their plight and their aspirations for freedom and self determination. But the truth is that, while Arab leaders have unlimited power in their countries, the President of the United States is constrained by the very forces and political philosophies that the Egyptian anti-Mubarak demonstrators so desperately crave for themselves. Obama can, and should, do little more than he is doing: publicly calling for calm and easing Mubarak into a position where he can leave as gracefully as possible, while doing the behind-the-scenes arm twisting of threatening a suspension of the $1.5 billion in foreign aid we give to Egypt each year, most of which goes to the Army, who are the real power there.
None of that really matters to the people in Tahrir Square, who are coated in dust and grime, hungry, thirsty and longing for a voice in their own destinies. Egypt has nearly doubled in population since Mubarak took power in the confusion resulting from the assassination of then-president Anwar Sadat 30 years ago and, as most of the protesters are younger people, almost none of them has any real memory of a president there other than Mubarak. Nor do they have any real memory of an Egypt not humiliated in war with Israel, or of an Egypt not bordered by an occupied Gaza Strip. In fact, many may still remember the pain of seeing their own Sinai Penninsula overrun by the Israelis in 1956 and 1967, or the Suez Canal, crucial to the region's economy, being seized by the Israelis (with the backing of the British and the French) in 1956. Far from the seat of world power that was Egypt in the early days of civilization, the nation on the Nile has been the pawn of the West for the entirety of modern memory and her leaders have taken advantage of that position to line their own pockets and to foment their hatred of the West within their own people in the process. Is it any wonder that a people with no real experience or understanding of a free press, where all the media are themselves heavily controlled by the Mubarak regime, would see the Western media in the same light and suspect them of plotting to stir up further violence and so then threaten these journalists with assault, kidnapping and beheading?
As much as these demonstrators may detest Mubarak and suspect the reporters who are attempting to tell their stories to the world, they truly hate Israel. They have been taught from birth to loath the "hated occupiers" and the only organized opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood (banned but tolerated as a foil to Mubarak for the West) is already calling for the renunciation of the historic peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter and signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in 1978. This potentiality becomes even more ominous when one considers the fact that several other countries in the region (Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen) are undergoing their own forms of civil unrest, all are Muslim and all have populations who bear no love for Israel. Add to that the fact that nuclear armed Israel's Prime minister now is the conservative Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and you have a recipe for Armageddon.
Reporting about this saga from my comfortable, if unseasonably chilly, Chandler home I have heard the eyewitness accounts of those Arizonans who have fled the violence in Egypt and are now back here waiting for this storm to blow over. Of particular note is the story of Debra Alcala, a Phoenix woman who lost her home when the housing bubble burst and she sold everything to move to a Cairo suburb and start up a "Curves for Women" fitness franchise. She told me of the gunfire and looting in her neighborhood and of how Egyptian officials threw open the doors of the prison, allowing thousands to escape and pillage the surrounding neighborhoods, including her own. But that is not her biggest fear. Her real concern is that the people that she knows in Egypt, the girls who work for her and her friends from the past four years, will all soon begin to despise her as an American. She is afraid that, when she returns to her life in Egypt, these people that she loves like family will hate her as a Western oppressor. But she tells me that she is hopeful, too, and that she is confident that, in the end, things will get better in Egypt because they can't get any worse.
Millions of people in America and around the world surely share that hope but the state and protester prompted eclipse of the televised coverage of this developing revolution is beginning to ominously foretell a coming disaster. Media is generally excluded from places where secrecy is desired for one of two reasons: either it would compromise positive developments in a story or it would reveal dark secrets that, if exposed, would thwart the machinations of those looking to do harm. Let's hope that this is not an effort to hide more sinister happenings on the ground in Tahrir Square, either to repeat Beijing's 1989 Tianamen Square Massacre that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese dissidents to restore order in that Communist country, or to ensconce radicals bent on resuming the war with Israel in the hopes of accomplishing the goal of so many people in that region over the years since 1948...to wipe that country off the map. Israel has nuclear weapons and would surely use them against anyone near to accomplishing that goal. If I can see this danger in the stories coming out of Egypt and the Middle East, surely President Obama and his advisers can too and they must also be preparing for that contingency as well.
Let us all pray that this crisis ends in a positive outcome for Egypt and her neighbors. A politically vibrant and diverse body politic can only help Egyptians and the world by enhancing stability and reducing the threat of war by reaching a new rapprochement with Israel and the West. With Gaza sandwiched between them, Israel and Egypt could work together in the coming years to finally find a solution to the thorny problem of Palestine that is acceptable to all parties involved and so remove the greatest threat to peace that exists today. The Chinese character for "crisis" means both "danger" and "opportunity." Here's hoping everyone will make the most of the opportunity afforded in this dangerous situation.
People can only be oppressed for so long and the corrupt governments that are the rule in the region are each bearing the brunt of what looks to be near simultaneous eruptions of independence and reform stretching from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the Persian Gulf, the perfect storm of political discord. Egyptians, especially, are acting as though they have been unbound and are free for the first time in more than three decades to truly speak their minds and to defend themselves against the forces that would stifle them, even at the barrel of a gun or crack of the whip held by pro-Mubarak camel cavalry.
But, now that the pictures have stopped streaming from the epicenter of this evolution in Middle Eastern politics, we must ask ourselves what is next. As the violence has ratcheted up, the transparency on both sides of this conflict has become more clouded. We have video of demonstrators announcing their hatred of the West and their contempt for the apparent slowness of action from President Barack Obama, the man they put so much faith in as he traveled to Cairo in 2009, telling the people there that America sympathized with their plight and their aspirations for freedom and self determination. But the truth is that, while Arab leaders have unlimited power in their countries, the President of the United States is constrained by the very forces and political philosophies that the Egyptian anti-Mubarak demonstrators so desperately crave for themselves. Obama can, and should, do little more than he is doing: publicly calling for calm and easing Mubarak into a position where he can leave as gracefully as possible, while doing the behind-the-scenes arm twisting of threatening a suspension of the $1.5 billion in foreign aid we give to Egypt each year, most of which goes to the Army, who are the real power there.
None of that really matters to the people in Tahrir Square, who are coated in dust and grime, hungry, thirsty and longing for a voice in their own destinies. Egypt has nearly doubled in population since Mubarak took power in the confusion resulting from the assassination of then-president Anwar Sadat 30 years ago and, as most of the protesters are younger people, almost none of them has any real memory of a president there other than Mubarak. Nor do they have any real memory of an Egypt not humiliated in war with Israel, or of an Egypt not bordered by an occupied Gaza Strip. In fact, many may still remember the pain of seeing their own Sinai Penninsula overrun by the Israelis in 1956 and 1967, or the Suez Canal, crucial to the region's economy, being seized by the Israelis (with the backing of the British and the French) in 1956. Far from the seat of world power that was Egypt in the early days of civilization, the nation on the Nile has been the pawn of the West for the entirety of modern memory and her leaders have taken advantage of that position to line their own pockets and to foment their hatred of the West within their own people in the process. Is it any wonder that a people with no real experience or understanding of a free press, where all the media are themselves heavily controlled by the Mubarak regime, would see the Western media in the same light and suspect them of plotting to stir up further violence and so then threaten these journalists with assault, kidnapping and beheading?
As much as these demonstrators may detest Mubarak and suspect the reporters who are attempting to tell their stories to the world, they truly hate Israel. They have been taught from birth to loath the "hated occupiers" and the only organized opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood (banned but tolerated as a foil to Mubarak for the West) is already calling for the renunciation of the historic peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter and signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in 1978. This potentiality becomes even more ominous when one considers the fact that several other countries in the region (Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen) are undergoing their own forms of civil unrest, all are Muslim and all have populations who bear no love for Israel. Add to that the fact that nuclear armed Israel's Prime minister now is the conservative Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and you have a recipe for Armageddon.
Reporting about this saga from my comfortable, if unseasonably chilly, Chandler home I have heard the eyewitness accounts of those Arizonans who have fled the violence in Egypt and are now back here waiting for this storm to blow over. Of particular note is the story of Debra Alcala, a Phoenix woman who lost her home when the housing bubble burst and she sold everything to move to a Cairo suburb and start up a "Curves for Women" fitness franchise. She told me of the gunfire and looting in her neighborhood and of how Egyptian officials threw open the doors of the prison, allowing thousands to escape and pillage the surrounding neighborhoods, including her own. But that is not her biggest fear. Her real concern is that the people that she knows in Egypt, the girls who work for her and her friends from the past four years, will all soon begin to despise her as an American. She is afraid that, when she returns to her life in Egypt, these people that she loves like family will hate her as a Western oppressor. But she tells me that she is hopeful, too, and that she is confident that, in the end, things will get better in Egypt because they can't get any worse.
Millions of people in America and around the world surely share that hope but the state and protester prompted eclipse of the televised coverage of this developing revolution is beginning to ominously foretell a coming disaster. Media is generally excluded from places where secrecy is desired for one of two reasons: either it would compromise positive developments in a story or it would reveal dark secrets that, if exposed, would thwart the machinations of those looking to do harm. Let's hope that this is not an effort to hide more sinister happenings on the ground in Tahrir Square, either to repeat Beijing's 1989 Tianamen Square Massacre that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese dissidents to restore order in that Communist country, or to ensconce radicals bent on resuming the war with Israel in the hopes of accomplishing the goal of so many people in that region over the years since 1948...to wipe that country off the map. Israel has nuclear weapons and would surely use them against anyone near to accomplishing that goal. If I can see this danger in the stories coming out of Egypt and the Middle East, surely President Obama and his advisers can too and they must also be preparing for that contingency as well.
Let us all pray that this crisis ends in a positive outcome for Egypt and her neighbors. A politically vibrant and diverse body politic can only help Egyptians and the world by enhancing stability and reducing the threat of war by reaching a new rapprochement with Israel and the West. With Gaza sandwiched between them, Israel and Egypt could work together in the coming years to finally find a solution to the thorny problem of Palestine that is acceptable to all parties involved and so remove the greatest threat to peace that exists today. The Chinese character for "crisis" means both "danger" and "opportunity." Here's hoping everyone will make the most of the opportunity afforded in this dangerous situation.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Tuscon Tragedy Twisted
I was at my wife and son's Tae Kwon Do class when I checked my blackberry and saw the horriffic news...20 people shot, seven dead including Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and an alleged shooter captured at the scene. I immediately called my studios to see if the weekend anchor was on top of the story and she was, as the news director had already given her some direction on the story and another reporter had already been dispatched to make the hour-and-a-half drive to Tucson.
As fast as this response was, though, the people looking to turn this tragedy to their political or philosophical advantage were even faster. Firstly, we had erroneous reports that Giffords was already dead in an effort to be first with the most sensational angle on the story. The problem was, though, that she was not dead and was in the beginning of a remarkable recovery even as my colleagues were writing her obituary. Secondly, we were told that accused shooter Jared Lee Loughner was a right-wing gun nut with a history of mental problems who only had such a powerful handgun capable of shooting so many people because the federal assault weapons ban had lapsed and Arizona's gun laws are too lax. The problem there is that he is, in fact, politically inclined to the Left and had never been officially diagnosed as mentally ill or been tagged as a prohibited possessor, and his weapon of choice was a pistol, not an assault weapon so he would legally have been able to buy this weapon in many other states. But, most importantly, the shootings prompted a cry from all corners that our civil discourse was no longer civil and the heated rhetoric we hear from talk radio and cable television (not to mention from the floors of both the House of Representatives and Senate) had directly led to this unbalanced person taking matters into his own hands and to attempt to silence Giffords and others who do not agree with his paranoid political philosophy. The problem there is that it was not the level of political discourse that led Loughner to pull the trigger that fateful Saturday morning in Tucson, but it was his isolated malignancy that caused all the pain.
But that simple truth, that Loughner is a single crazy man who decided to shoot up a political gathering on a beautiful Arizona day, is now being used to dramatically alter the American political landscape and to kill its vibrancy of debate and disagreement, sterilizing it and thereby imposing the very intolerance of differing opinions that is being decried by the people effecting the change. We are now told that we can not use words like "kill", "target" or "aim", metaphorically, anymore because they inflame passions and plant ideas in crazy people's heads that will drive them to murder innocents. It was George Orwell who showed us in 1984 that if you control language you control thought. We cannot conceive of ideas beyond those which we can put into words and for every word we eliminate from the ongoing discussion that is America we eliminate another idea from our collective consciousness.
It is important to remember that our nation was founded on the core belief that anyone that had a mind to speak should be able to do so freely. The U.S. Supreme court has had to impose reasonable limits on speech, like the famous "shouting fire in a crowded theater" standard to ensure the right to freely speak does not infringe on the right to be secure in one's person, but that same court has ruled repeatedly that political speech is the most protected form of speech and that is the very speech threatened by all these calls for civility. The real aim of those calling for more polite discourse is not the restore comity, though. Their real aim is to stifle the opposition from a position of moral superiority and to thereby enhance their own political power and to perpetuate it as even more contentious issues, like illegal immigration or difficult budget decisions come to the fore.
I was touched by these tragedies. I drove down to cover President Barack Obama's speech at the memorial service and I visited the Safeway store where the shootings occurred almost a week prior, with the FBI investigators still there and the yellow crime scene tape still cordoning off the scene from the public. I visited Gabrielle Giffords' offices where somber workers, dressed in black, prepared to feel sad for those killed but also rejoice in the miraculous recovery Giffords was making, where hundreds if not thousands of cards, letters, candles and stuffed toys paid tribute to the victims and to the humanity of Tuscsonans. I sat on the floor of the University of Arizona's McKale Center and watched the President eloquently call for us all to be better to one another and I heard the roar of the 14,000 people there who were treating the memorial as more pep rally than service for the dead and the living.
I have also seen how little things are really changing in these weeks after the shootings. After the call for a more civil political discourse, the very state politicians who promised to change their ways are telling me, and other reporters, now that the Governor is deceiving voters over the state budget and that she is "balancing it on the backs of the poor and the vulnerable". For better, or worse, we have an adversarial political system where competing ideas are debated and examined and the people then decide which of those is best for the country. But that system cannot work if the free flow of debate over those ideas is hampered by artificial constraints on how we present the arguments on either side of any political question. This is a system that has served us well for more than 200 years as a nation and for more than 2,000 years through the evolution of Western Civilization. If we let ourselves retreat from bravely tackling the issues of the day for fear of the confrontation and friction that can cause, then Jaren Lee Loughner will have done far more damage in those few seconds of mayhem than he could have ever imagined.
As fast as this response was, though, the people looking to turn this tragedy to their political or philosophical advantage were even faster. Firstly, we had erroneous reports that Giffords was already dead in an effort to be first with the most sensational angle on the story. The problem was, though, that she was not dead and was in the beginning of a remarkable recovery even as my colleagues were writing her obituary. Secondly, we were told that accused shooter Jared Lee Loughner was a right-wing gun nut with a history of mental problems who only had such a powerful handgun capable of shooting so many people because the federal assault weapons ban had lapsed and Arizona's gun laws are too lax. The problem there is that he is, in fact, politically inclined to the Left and had never been officially diagnosed as mentally ill or been tagged as a prohibited possessor, and his weapon of choice was a pistol, not an assault weapon so he would legally have been able to buy this weapon in many other states. But, most importantly, the shootings prompted a cry from all corners that our civil discourse was no longer civil and the heated rhetoric we hear from talk radio and cable television (not to mention from the floors of both the House of Representatives and Senate) had directly led to this unbalanced person taking matters into his own hands and to attempt to silence Giffords and others who do not agree with his paranoid political philosophy. The problem there is that it was not the level of political discourse that led Loughner to pull the trigger that fateful Saturday morning in Tucson, but it was his isolated malignancy that caused all the pain.
But that simple truth, that Loughner is a single crazy man who decided to shoot up a political gathering on a beautiful Arizona day, is now being used to dramatically alter the American political landscape and to kill its vibrancy of debate and disagreement, sterilizing it and thereby imposing the very intolerance of differing opinions that is being decried by the people effecting the change. We are now told that we can not use words like "kill", "target" or "aim", metaphorically, anymore because they inflame passions and plant ideas in crazy people's heads that will drive them to murder innocents. It was George Orwell who showed us in 1984 that if you control language you control thought. We cannot conceive of ideas beyond those which we can put into words and for every word we eliminate from the ongoing discussion that is America we eliminate another idea from our collective consciousness.
It is important to remember that our nation was founded on the core belief that anyone that had a mind to speak should be able to do so freely. The U.S. Supreme court has had to impose reasonable limits on speech, like the famous "shouting fire in a crowded theater" standard to ensure the right to freely speak does not infringe on the right to be secure in one's person, but that same court has ruled repeatedly that political speech is the most protected form of speech and that is the very speech threatened by all these calls for civility. The real aim of those calling for more polite discourse is not the restore comity, though. Their real aim is to stifle the opposition from a position of moral superiority and to thereby enhance their own political power and to perpetuate it as even more contentious issues, like illegal immigration or difficult budget decisions come to the fore.
I was touched by these tragedies. I drove down to cover President Barack Obama's speech at the memorial service and I visited the Safeway store where the shootings occurred almost a week prior, with the FBI investigators still there and the yellow crime scene tape still cordoning off the scene from the public. I visited Gabrielle Giffords' offices where somber workers, dressed in black, prepared to feel sad for those killed but also rejoice in the miraculous recovery Giffords was making, where hundreds if not thousands of cards, letters, candles and stuffed toys paid tribute to the victims and to the humanity of Tuscsonans. I sat on the floor of the University of Arizona's McKale Center and watched the President eloquently call for us all to be better to one another and I heard the roar of the 14,000 people there who were treating the memorial as more pep rally than service for the dead and the living.
I have also seen how little things are really changing in these weeks after the shootings. After the call for a more civil political discourse, the very state politicians who promised to change their ways are telling me, and other reporters, now that the Governor is deceiving voters over the state budget and that she is "balancing it on the backs of the poor and the vulnerable". For better, or worse, we have an adversarial political system where competing ideas are debated and examined and the people then decide which of those is best for the country. But that system cannot work if the free flow of debate over those ideas is hampered by artificial constraints on how we present the arguments on either side of any political question. This is a system that has served us well for more than 200 years as a nation and for more than 2,000 years through the evolution of Western Civilization. If we let ourselves retreat from bravely tackling the issues of the day for fear of the confrontation and friction that can cause, then Jaren Lee Loughner will have done far more damage in those few seconds of mayhem than he could have ever imagined.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)