a plea

The US Representative for my District, Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head this morning outside a Safeway that is four miles away from my house. I drive through that intersection every day. I have shopped at that Safeway hundreds of times. Miraculously, at the time of this posting, she is still alive and is responsive, though still in critical condition.

In one way, it was not unexpected to me. Our country has been split along party lines so deeply of late, and people have been spouting such obscene amounts of hate and violence, that something like this was bound to happen eventually. And yet, I did not expect it to happen--to begin, it feels like--so very very close to my home.

As the day went on, things began to feel more and more unreal, and this passage from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby kept floating to the surface of my mind:

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . .

Please, no matter what your politics are, please take this opportunity to reevaluate the way you speak and think about the people whose views are different than your own. It is one thing to say you disagree. It is an entirely different thing to say that people deserve death because they disagree with you. Additionally, perhaps it is time to thoroughly examine the accuracy and the source of the information--and especially, the validity of the opinions--on which you base your worldview. Please, let's bring some intelligent, rational thought back to a country that has been without it for far too long.