Finding Hope in Arizona
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…)
