I took an unexpectedly long nap and ended up awake at midnight, looking around the net I saw this via Lisa Graas:
Is it just me, or is there an incredible lack of reason on the Left?
Incidentally, the way I found out about the shooting was through an avalanche of tweets calling Sarah Palin a ‘murderer’. I was even called a murderer for asking people not to point fingers of blame. There is certainly ‘vitriol’…..but it’s not coming from the direction the Left claims.
For two days I’ve been seeing people hurling the vilest accusations at the Tea party in general and Sarah Palin in particular without any factual basis. And if that isn’t enough everyone’s favorite Democratic Pastor Fred Phelps plans on jumping into the fray..
Phelps praises Loughner’s violent acts in this video, where he announces he will be taking his sick protest to the funerals of the victims of the Arizona shooting spree. He also refers to Loughner as an Afghanistan war veteran, even though initial reports of Loughner being a veteran turned out to be false.
It’s pretty bad, almost as bad as this reaction to the murder of another poll half a world away:
Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Pakistan’s largest city on Sunday to oppose any change to national blasphemy laws and to praise a man charged with murdering a provincial governor who had campaigned against the divisive legislation.
The rally of up to 50,000 people in downtown Karachi was one of the largest demonstrations of support for the laws, which make insulting Islam a capital offense. It was organized before the governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was shot dead on Tuesday in Islamabad by a bodyguard who told a court he considered Taseer a blasphemer.
Muslim groups have praised the bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, and have used Taseer’s death to warn others not to speak out against the much-derided laws.
Now what does a group of religions fanatics Pious Muslims marching have to do with the left?
Simply this. The Governor of Punjab by challenging his fellow Muslim’s belief was a threat to their mind-set. It’s much easier to eliminate people who challenge your religious beliefs than to defend those beliefs, much less thinking involved.
When I look at the left willing to blame Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart, the Tea Party and even Lisa Graas for inciting violence while both using violent rhetoric and ignoring their own violent rhetoric in the past the pieces fit together.
The left secular political beliefs have essentially morphed into a religion. The right feelings and opinions are the sacraments (much easier than having to follow actual commandments like traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs) if you have them you are considered righteous.
Conversely if you don’t share those beliefs you are outside, you are the devil and evil, and since you are evil any level of vitriolic rhetoric or action is permissible. Rather than praying for your enemies as Christianity commands one can hate them openly and feel good about it.
This is why above all Sarah Palin is their Anti-Christ. She symbolizes all that they hate, she is a person of action who lives her beliefs and does so publicly and unabashedly. She is a reminder of a reality that their religion needs to suppress. Screwtape 13 had it pegged:
The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method—by making him a kind of Childe Harold or Werther submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses—you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem.
But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures. How can you have
failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn’t you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value?
This is why the right in general and Sarah Palin in particular must be attacked here. Every moment that she is not brings the possibility that realization might strike, that the superficial might be replaced by a foundation in reality and that reality is anathema to all that has come before.
Today Elizabeth Scalia asks the question what is wrong with the world. Chesterton’s spectacular Catholic Answer was “I am” and thus stove to change and improve himself. A great example to all Christians in general and Catholics in particular but self-realization is a tough and painful process and many don’t want to face it. Much easier to carry on confident in one perfection.
Until those on the left can come to Chesterton’s answer and work to correct it we will see more of the same. Remember screwtapes final warning:
The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel,
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This isn’t about right or left or Palin or Obama or whoever v. whoever.
Palin herself is not to blame for this specific incident, and just from the little we’ve seen of the rantings of the poor sorry soul who pulled the trigger in AZ, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to pin this in on anything other than his mental illness, but if there’s anything to gain from this tragedy, it’s an honest assessment of what passes for political and religious discourse these days from all sides, all corners, all venues.
This world is a hot mess and none of us are guilt-free, but those who have access to a public platform do incur a greater responsibility for guarding their tongues. Opinion show hosts, radio talk show hosts, journalists, bloggers should all be thinking a lot more than they’re performing/talking/writing these days.
For the right, especially, because they tend to blend their politics and religion more than the left, would it kill them to spend a few minutes sincerely asking themselves if their words and the intended impact really work towards the greater glory of God? More often than not it seems their words and their intent work towards the greater glory of themselves, or their network, or their party or their publication or blog.
This isn’t about blame. It’s about EVERYBODY dialing it down a notch or ten or twenty and taking some time to think. This instant gratification, instant twitter/FB/blog, 24/7 news cycle, youtube world we live in is not a good thing — it’s not good for any of us on any level.
Call me a Luddite if you like, but Palin, Beck, et al. wouldn’t be caught in the middle of this mess if they had to write out in longhand every piece of nonsense that flitted through their heads and then walk it over to the printer, who would have to hand set the type and then distribute the printed piece on foot. Seriously — when ink and paper cost serious money and when writing takes time and publishing something meant walking it over to someone you had to look in the eye, you probably thought a lot harder about what you put out there.
There are a couple of flaws in your argument but the biggest one is that the world is the “world is in a hot mess” business.
Any examination of history, even if one confines themselves to American History will show that public discourse has always been rough and tumble. The history of the US is ripe with examples that would make the most angry person of today blush. The reason why it is perceived by the left as different is that because of a fluke of politics the left had an inordinate amount of power and influence in media and the body politic for a period between 1960-1982 to the point where effective contrary voices were almost invisible.
You regrets on the internet are well taken, without the internet the left control of the message through the MSM was hard to challenge, the freedom of the internet (for good and for bad) shattered that ability to control and thus robbed of said control the objections take place.
I don’t recall the reasoned voices of the left demanding restraint from those who called for the death of our previous president, or encouraging our troops to kill their officers or those from code pink who protested wounded soldiers in the hospital. As long as those outrages were targeted to the right they were celebrated by the left as an expression of free speech.
The sheer anger that some people feel when even Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin’s names are mentioned border on the irrational, I’ve seen democratic operatives that I’ve spoken to in
restaurants literally seethe and scream at the mention of her name.
The simplest comparison of the way the left and the right looks at things are the photos of the capital after their relative rallies. Beck and Freedom works’ rallies left a spotless mall as they showed respect for the government even as they disagreed with it.
Meanwhile the Union rallies and the like left large messes all over monuments including the WW2 monuments. No respect for the other.
As a person who has heard both Palin and Beck speak in person I think I speak for all of the right when I say, thank you for your concerns but I think we will decline to allow you to define those who we support by standards which we don’t agree with, but thanks for reading and commenting.