New Clear Vision

A Firsthand Account of “Healing and Understanding”

by Maggie McQuaid

I left Bisbee (in Southern Arizona) at 9:30am and made it to Tucson about 2 hours later where I met up with Susan, a coworker, and her partner Veira. We hopped a city bus and got to the University of Arizona campus around noon where we joined a rapidly growing throng outside the McKale Basketball Arena. Campus police, Secret Service, the Tucson Police Department, and the US Marshals were very much in evidence. Despite having a huge crowd on hand, they were all decent and courteous.

We were pretty much sequestered in an open area outside the arena, where we could leave if we wished, but could not come back. By 1:00 that afternoon, the announcement was made that the crowd was already at stadium capacity, and that anyone arriving on campus past that point would not be able to get in. We were closely packed in amongst thousands of others, with no room to sit down. I had expected porta-johns and food vendors, but there were none to be had. (more…)

What It’s Really Like to Live in Arizona

by Joel Olson

With the passage of the notorious anti-immigrant bill SB 1070 last spring, the outlawing of ethnic studies as of January 1st, the gutting of the school and university systems, the collapsed housing market, the high unemployment rates, and now the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, you might be wondering what it’s like to actually live in Arizona right about now.

In short: it ain’t easy. But it helps to put Giffords’s shooting in historical perspective, which is defined by two things in Arizona: corruption and class struggle.  And ironically, this perspective gives me hope about the radically democratic future of my home state.

Arizona’s economy was founded on the Five Cs: copper, cotton, cattle, citrus, and climate (tourism). These Cs were controlled by big mining and agricultural interests and real estate developers. Corruption was commonplace as they manipulated the political system for their benefit. A group of these capitalists, called the Phoenix 40, controlled state politics until the 1970s, when the political establishment opened up some. But even after their rule, the state capitol has always been a place to lie, bribe, and scam your way to what you want. If the names Don Bowles, Evan Mecham, AZscam, Fife Symington, or the Keating 5 (which included Senator John McCain) mean anything to you, then you know that corruption is as plentiful as the parking here. And I haven’t even mentioned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio or State Senator Russell Pearce, the tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum of racist nativism. (more…)

We Can and Must Learn from the Tucson Tragedy

by Keli Goff

More than a year ago former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi generated headlines due to a rare public display of raw emotion. She became visibly choked up while voicing concern that the increasingly heated rhetoric permeating our political discourse at the height of the health care debate could soon turn violent; something she had seen firsthand years before with the 1978 shooting of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, one of the nation’s first openly gay elected officials.

There were plenty of those who at the time thought Pelosi was being paranoid or dramatic. Today of course her words seem sadly prescient. Around that time I wrote a post titled “Why I’m  Grateful for Joe Wilson and the Fury of Racists.” To the surprise of many, in it I expressed optimism with the direction our country was heading, despite agreeing with Pelosi that the vitriolic tone hijacking our political discourse was coming close to paralyzing it altogether. (more…)

Democracy and Humanity in the Balance

by Michael N. Nagler

The night after Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others were shot, I happened to be officiating at a celebration for the career of a close friend of mine who has devoted his life to the search for nonviolence and peace. There were nearly 200 of us from a great variety of organizations, all of which had stories about nonviolent actions and projects they had done that actually worked.

I must confess that when the shock of grief has worn off after an event like this horrific shooting, I hear myself asking my fellow Americans, in some exasperation: how long do you want this to go on?

Happily, this time things were a little bit different, in one respect. For the first time that I am aware, there was in almost all the commentaries the hint of an apparently forbidden truth: that we bring violence on ourselves when we promote it, glorify it, or legitimize it — as in this case by the extreme rhetoric associated with Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, among others.

Let us by all means seize on that hint. It is exactly right that when goaded into violence by our words or thoughts, we — and not just a few deranged killers — get that much closer to ‘losing it’ and acting out some form of destruction in real life. Massive scientific evidence confirms this connection, which is anyway obvious if you know anything about human nature. What we think, we eventually do; in particular, when we think righteous hatred, we will do vile things that are unworthy of our humanity. (more…)

From a Culture of Violence to a Place of Recognition

by Randall Amster

Whatever your political leanings, you’d have to be incredibly hardhearted not to be moved by the shooting in Tucson that claimed the lives of a federal judge and a nine year old girl, among others, and critically wounded Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Some will attempt to politicize this episode as emblematic of the poverty of the “other side,” whereas others will seek to depoliticize it as the work of a deranged “lone gunman.” Meanwhile, moderate voices will be raised aghast at the violence in our midst, both of the rhetorical and spectacular varieties, and many will attempt to draw a direct link between the two. And still, in all likelihood, all of this will soon fade into the collective rear-view mirror and slide down the news queue, as the “normal” state of business as usual adjusts to a new equilibrium that encourages a reestablished complacency. (more…)

Solar Advocate, Gay Rights Supporter Gabrielle Giffords Attacked in Tucson

Editor’s Note: While remaining committed to finding the positive news in the daily cycle, reality nonetheless intrudes and at times demands our attention. Today’s shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and a Federal Judge who had previously been the target of anti-immigrant protesters, among other victims, is a sobering reminder of the political “climate of fear” that has been fostered here in Arizona.

“Even before the shooting of a U.S. congresswoman on Saturday, the state of Arizona was in the throes of a convulsive political year that had come to symbolize a bitter partisan divide across much of America,” writes David Schwartz in Reuters. “I feel huge sorrow, that’s just been building in southern Arizona for some time, this hate, hate, fear, somewhat around SB 1070, somewhat around healthcare reform. It definitely heated up when President Obama was elected,” said Molly McKasson Morgan, 63, who participated in Tucson politics and knew Giffords. “It’s never been this angry, it’s never been this divisive,” said Alfredo Gutierrez, a former state lawmaker. As Matt Bai has written in the New York Times, “the question is whether Saturday’s shooting marks the logical end point of such a moment of rhetorical recklessness — or rather the beginning of a terrifying new one.”

This report attempts to synthesize the details of today’s shooting and place it in a context framed by Arizona politics. In addition to the fact that the gunman was apparently preoccupied by “literacy” issues, he also listed Mein Kampf as among his favorite books and claimed to be a recent Army recruit. Giffords previously has had her office vandalized, and notably was listed among the 20 congresspersons on Sarah Palin‘s infamous “gun sight” chart that targeted Democratic politicians in a provocative manner. The Tucson Citizen‘s “Three Sonorans” blog is reporting that also today the Mexican-American Studies department at the University of Arizona was vandalized, and that the Federal Judge who was killed had recently been assigned to hear the challenge to the law banning Ethnic Studies in Arizona. Giffords’ Republican opponent in the November 2010 congressional race, Jesse Kelly, was also criticized for a campaign event at a shooting range, advertised with the words “Get on Target for Victory in November,” “Help remove Gabriel Giffords from office” and “Shoot a fully automatic M16.”

We want to express our deepest condolences to all of the families affected by this tragedy, and also to all Arizonans struggling to find cause for hope in these very trying times…. (more…)

It’s Cool to be Kind

by Debbie Ouellet

“What this world needs is a new kind of army — the army of the kind.”

— Cleveland Amory, author

Search the headlines at the dawn of this new decade and you’ll find countless examples of everything that’s wrong in the world today. The ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. Genocide in Dafur. A deadly earthquake in Haiti. Recently, a friend commented, “The whole world’s gone to hell and there’s nothing we can do about it.” The acceptance in that comment troubled me. It’s not the first time I’ve heard the sentiment voiced.

Is there nothing we can do about it? The question stayed with me for some time. Let’s face it: the problems plastered all over the evening news are so big that whole governments can’t seem to find a way to correct them. What hope does a solitary person have in making a change for the better?

Like other “truth seekers,” I decided to go looking for an answer — and found its genesis in the most unlikely of places: a calendar of holidays and observances. In January and February alone, there are four days dedicated to acts of kindness: January 21st, Hugging Day; January 24th, Compliment Day; February 11th, Make a Friend Day; and February 17th, Random Acts of Kindness Day. At some point in history, a person or organization decided to lobby to dedicate one day each year to bettering the life of other human beings. How? By being kind to them. And, why? Because there is something we can do about the state of the world. (more…)