Making it political

There has been a call not to politicize the Arizona tragedy, not to turn it into a platform about one's pet causes. A fair complaint if what's happening is politicians saying, a vote for me proves you care. Not so much if someone - politician or otherwise - truly believes a particular social ill led to the tragedy taking place, and feels a moral obligation to speak out to prevent further such tragedies. If you really do think the problem is the Tea Party and Sarah Palin's Real-America rhetoric, what then? Or if you think it's mental illness? Pot? Communism? Guns?*

There's no way to react apolitically, either to the tragedy itself or to others' reactions to it. One might argue, for example, that David Brooks's concerned essay on mental-health issues is no more than an attempt by a conservative to shift attention away from the probability that this particular lunatic was a right-wing lunatic, and that his lunacy may be less important than his specific and straightforwardly categorized political motivations. Or one might read the op-ed sympathetically and say that Brooks, like all decent individuals, wants to save lives, and believes this is the best way to do it. The problem is that people come to their politics, their causes, their opinions, because they believe their stances to be the ones most beneficial to society. Unless we have good reason to think in a particular case, a stance has been taken for personal gain, what of it? It's perfectly legitimate to point out the flaws in various reactions - curbing free speech has consequences, as has the War on Drugs, etc. But this is at the level of discussing policy. To say that individuals shouldn't react to tragedies by stating what larger force they think was the catalyst cuts off discussion prematurely, and is itself a way of supporting a cause, 'making it political,' suggesting that an opinion that ties a tragedy to anything specific is so dangerous of an opinion that it must be repressed long before the legislation stage.

That, and it's almost bizarre not to draw in larger issues, and to do no more than mourn neutrally in these situations. There's plenty of tragedy in our own lives, among our own loved ones, not to mention among those we don't know except through statistics. The times when all you can do is wish the family well, or pray for them if that's your approach, are, unfortunately, plentiful. If we care more in high-profile, politically-charged cases than in the ones buried in newspapers, it's because they represent tragedies on a larger scale, and because we who are not the loved ones of the victims have the emotional distance necessary to look at a tragedy as evidence of a broader issue. Pretending that we don't, that we're so overcome with the horribleness that we can't connect it to anything greater, is, for all but the most sensitive, disingenuous.

*My own stance, for what it's worth, is quite firmly in that last category. While I'm obviously not keen on anti-Semitism, an ideology which may have played a role here and which creeps me out personally, and which I think I can do more about given my knowledge and skill set, which is part of why you hear about it more on this blog, guns strike me as the bigger issue.