Nightmare in Tuscon

It is being pieced together what exactly caused Jared Lee Loughner to kill six people and to wound 13 others at a public get-together for Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

We would like to think it was a simple insane act by an insane man but we know it runs deeper and is more ominous than that.

In the late 1960’s, the rhetoric of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy caused the lunatic fringe to act out. Everything King and Kennedy said and stood for, resulted in those standing on the opposite side of their politics being emboldened to act out.

Whenever they spoke in front of a large crowd, they put their lives in danger.  This may be what is coming to pass in the world we live in today. The young man who shot the congresswoman in the head, who killed six others, including a Federal judge and a 9 year-old, seems to have known exactly what he was doing. Like those incited by the politics they opposed in the 1960’s, he was apparently moved to action by the almost violent rhetoric that pervades so much of the mass media today.

It is high time we re-explore how we communicate our political differences or there will be more violence like that we witnessed in Tuscon over the weekend.