When Politics Turns from Talk to Killing

Today, James von Brunn became the latest domestic terrorist to express his political views with an act of murder, in this case an attempted mass murder. National Holocaust Museum security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns, by contrast, joined an inspiring list of American heroes who have stopped a terrorists bullet with their own bodies.

While we mourn for the loss of Stephen Johns and our hearts reach out to his family and loved ones, it is worth considering a simple question: What can each of us do to stop this startling trend--this horrible switch some Americans are making from talk to violence to express their politics?

To be realistic, the people who have been directly victimized by these crimes never had the luxury of feeling safe. Nonetheless, now is the time for each of us to ask what we can do to stem this trend of violence.

For starters, we can pause and insist on a better political debate and we can talk openly about the kind of political talk we demand from our media, our politicians, and ourselves.

This moment when politics seems to be turning from talk to killing has emerged at a time when our politics is dominated by an alarming amount of over-the-top confrontational rhetoric firing on all cylinders from every form of broadcast media. It is not just unpleasant, but capable of heating already simmering citizens to the boiling point.

As summer heats up, we should all do what it takes to ratchet the political rhetoric down.

My suggestions are simple enough for everyone to do immediately.

First, the next time we hear a radio or TV host bombard an issue with overstated, violent rhetoric--we need to speak out against it. We should turn it off, sure. But we also need to tell our neighbors, friends, and coworkers that we do not want that kind of talk in our media.

Second, the next time we hear a politician incite hateful rage on the campaign trail with unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy theories about their opponents--we need to speak out against it. We should vote for someone else, sure. But we also need to tell our neighbors, friends, and coworkers that we do not want that kind of talk in our elections.

What each of us can do is stop consuming the rhetoric that pushes people to even consider violence as legitimate politics. And then, we need to say in our own words what kind of civic culture we want to reclaim.

Insisting on a better public debate will not magically do away with the various hateful ideologies that drive political assassins to kill, but it can go a long way to cooling things down.

The fact is, Americans are out of practice standing up and saying in our own words what kind of public discussion we expect in our politics. What we want is a conversation in the media and in the public square that helps us get the information we need to understand the complex problems we can only solve together.

We want a productive, pragmatic debate. To get back to it, we need to say so out loud.

As we head into summer, each of us can honor the memory of Stephen Tyrone Johns not only with our silent prayers, but by sharing with others the kind of talk we want in our politics.

(cross posted from Frameshop)

Comments

[CRT4Obama]

Well said.

[phil28]

We can do a lot more than talking to our neighbors. We can contact the sponsors of the offending shows and other media and tell them we will no longer buy their products. And in the case of Fox News cancel our subscription to the Wall St Journal, both owned by Murdoch.

[Ascoli]

America has become a very sick and danderous place.

[Computer Geek]

Another way to fight the media hate - boycott their advertisers! Spread the word ... any company funding Limbaugh or these others who incite these right-wing haters should be made to feel our disgust and moral indignation through a ban on their products. It will stop them once and for all.

[jsgaetano]

Conservatives in power- shutting out everyone else, ridiculing "bipartisanship", calling everyone who opposes them traitors.

Conservatives out of power- domestic terrorists.

[SonofLiberty1]

And as I have tried to say here on Huffpost in the last several days....

These actions have been taken by people who are NOT like everyone else.
And it doesn't matter if they call themselves Christians or Jews or whatever because they are

NOT acting in that manner.

These are actions of people who are seriously mentally ill. They have brain diseases and they have slipped all the way through the cracks...

These people should NOT have been on the streets at all.

And even though, the violent mentally ill is A VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE, out of 300 Million of us they amount to more than a few.

Yes, a lot of these kinds of sad, horrible and sometimes life taking events happen everyday but few make it to the national news.

Better for us to spend the money to help people and if they can't be helped and they are violent, they need to be out of mainstream society where THEY WILL DO NO HARM!

[HyperInfluential]

I'll never forget when Ronald Reagan signed the law shutting down the public mental hospitals and turning the residents out into the streets. We looked at each other and asked, "Well...where will they go, then?" We've paid a terrible price for the money Reagan saved.

[hent85]

Europe has universal health yet you see crazies that go and stabbed a handful of people in Germany then there was that Norway student last year who shot a bunch of people. Europe is not free of insane people walking the streets to commit murder because there is univeral health care

Part of caring for mentally disturbed individuals is to surround them among sane people not just institutionlize them because they might commit a crime in the future that is a dangerous police power.

[SonofLiberty1]

I think the whole idea was that we shouldn't really be locking people up.
JFK didn't want to do it either,

Problem is that these folks have diseases of the brain and they effect the perception that all of us take for granted.

[Tim303]

Thatcher followed suit.

[sienak]

Some of this is mental illness, but there are plenty of people who bomb abortion clinics and kill based on their beliefs and are perfectly lucid. Just like fundamentalist Muslim terrorists, there are people in this country who are so confident in their beliefs and their interpretation of religious documents that they take those to the logical conclusions.

It's true, if you really believe that an abortion is as terrible as a human death, it makes sense to kill abortion doctors. The problem here is fundamentalism - following a doctrine so faithfully that you take it to its most awful extreme, and believe that you are right because it holds together in your mind, no matter what your instincts might be telling you. These people aren't insane - they're something worse.

[Tim303]

Most of the violence is situational. Read Zimbardo.

[SonofLiberty1]

I was thinking about this when I heard former the former Secretary of State and his wife on CNN.

You know, a lot of folks who comment here on Huffpost exhibit the same kind of anger attributed to Republicans, Neo cons and the like.

And who are they mad at?

Christians, Catholics, The Mormons and others who are religious.

And some of those, who are mad, happen to be those who are not religious or happen to be Gay.

Now I think that we used to have an idea in this land that all of us had the freedom to be heard and the
freedom of religion..to practice it or not to and the ability and understanding to tolerate the differences of all....

Religious toleration....

Maybe we need to get back to that?

Maybe we need to all practice it?

Maybe some of us here, need to drop the vitriol and ask questions about those with
religious views different then our own instead of demonizing?

You see, it goes both ways....

[crowepps]

That's certainly the ideal, and it would be wonderful if it do go 'both ways'. But when women can't get complete medical care because the hospital in their town is Catholic and won't provide sterilizations or the morning after pill, when gays are treated unequally because Evangelists insist that they have a 'religious freedom' right to discriminate against them, when pharmacists refuse to provide birth control, when people are evicted from Black Jack Missouri because they have children but aren't married, when the majority of parent want schools to provide comprehensive sex eduction but instead the only thing available to their children is 'abstinence ed', then one of the things we already know about those with religious views different than our own is that they are making strenuous efforts to use the law to force us to conform to the tenets of their faith instead of respecting our right to believe something different.

Practicing tolerance doesn't work as solitare.

[Rogan]

Well said. Also, there's a "false equivalency" in the comment left by "SonofLiberty1." That is to say: I often leave comments that are unapologetically anti-Christian. I've never left comments threatening violence, or comments that contain veiled or implied threats, or comments that describe fantasies of violent action. For the Christian Republican types, spouting threats of violence is par for the course. I don't know how you'd spot a credible threat from those guys; the comments pages on the right-wing websites are full of the most frightening and nasty and brutish nonsense you can imagine, and threatened violence, or descriptions of fantasized violence, are ubiquitous.

I loathe Christians. But I can't imagine making physical threats, even flippantly, to express that loathing. Nor do I fantasize about killing people, even people I loathe. Not in the normal course of things. The self-identifying Republicans apparently do - for them, that kind of ugliness is normal.

[Nommo]

"Stem the tide of violence", how funny. Did you really use those words? It is a bit late to stem any such tides. Did this guy just emerge from nowhere? Where was the concern for violence when it was a routine practice against Civil Rights demonstrators? When churches were being firebombed? Where was the concern about violence when the US was in the thrall of "shock and awe"?

I guess it matters who the violence is being perpetrated against.

[HyperInfluential]

Um, this tide of violence is still against the civil rights types, so...I don't get what you're saying.

[RTIII]

The only real solution is MEDIA DIVESTITURE.

Media divestiture means returning to the former rules that we had in place that prevented media consolidation.

Last time I checked (and there are two excellent web sites, on opposite sides of the political spectrum which collect and publish the data) over 90% of all media in the USA - TV, radio, news papers, etc - are owned (outright or controlling interest) by a mere FIVE PEOPLE.

It's not so obvious because there are so many corporations in the way. One corp owns another. There's a division here, a division there. ...It's a big shell game, but the truth is out there.

...This is why there's so little variance in opinion on the airwaves and why so much of what we get looks like the same from the others in terms of both form and packaging. These media are brainwashing a large segment of our population - say 20% or so - while at the same time slowly desensitizing our own ears to their propaganda.

Read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky for a good description of how the media makes opinion in the USA.
.

[HyperInfluential]

Good point! Revoke the special waivers for FOX! It's turned out they were not so good for our country that they deserved special permission beyond what others are allowed to do. In fact it's worked out rather badly.

[hent85]

To be fair we should do the same for GE which owns NBC, MSNBC CNBC among others; Time Warner with CNN several Hollywood Studios over a fifety publications and other media then Disney that owns ABC, ESPN and film studios. lets break up those eight major monopolies.

[mcthfg]

I know what you mean - those jerks that started our country thought the only way to express their politics was violence, and look how bad that turned out...

When you deal with an enemy that only knows violence, violence is the only way to deal with them. You can't hug someone into submission that wants to kill you. We've been at war with the right for years now, and they keep killing us - Matt Shepard, abortions docs, civil rights leaders - but we're too dumb to know there's a war.

Sean Connery says in The Untouchables "Isn't it just like a (racial slur) to bring a knife to a gunfight?" Well, liberals have always brought the knife to the gunfight, and that's got to change.

[returnofthejedi]

I preffer a nimitz class.

[HyperInfluential]

That way leads to the Dark Side. The Founders only turned to violence after lawfully petitioning for redress of their grievances, being rebuffed and not allowed representation in the debate, and pledging their lives, liberty, and sacred honor to creating a new country. As the land they wanted was already claimed by Britain, clearly there had to be a war. Our situation is nothing like that. We're in a good land with a fine Constitution, the best on earth in fact, and we can use the system our wise Founders left us to fix all this stuff.

We WON you guys! We ARE going to fix this! Let's go forth with an attitude of joy along with our passion, because the dinosaur time of the GOP is finally over, and these are their final tantrums before they're hooked off the stage. That's why they're so angry! Hopefully they'll calm down as the years go by and everything just gets good again, without the re-education camps and whatnot that FOX has them stirred up about.

[strongwilled]

This childish we won mentality that pits American against American is silly. How stupid, petty and small these juveniles are. Nothing constructive comes from these types.

[Golfer59]

It's always the crazy pro-life republicans..

[clearwaterclearmind]

except when it's a mvslim intent on shooting american soldiers, or the ALF burning homes, or spoiled college students that blow up cops, or any of the other myriad radical groups who are willing to resort to violence to make their opinions known to the world. hate is hate, and neither the right or left is immune to it or free of individuals who will carry it to violence.

[mama1974]

This kind of thinking seems logical when put down on paper but utilizing it in our everyday lives won't do a whole lot. It's fine to talk to friends, family, co-workers and neighbors until you confront the one who's view differs from your view. This twisted man's history suggests that he built his rage based on being told that he was wrong. Furthermore, he may have gotten these illusions of granduer based on his own desire to place himself above others. How do we fight against such hostility?

[HyperInfluential]

Universal health care must include mental health care for people like this. There are medicines that could have helped him get over his violent obsessions and had a good life without hurting anybody.

[Jazzman323]

I really belive those who live on the fringe, who have no life or resources, and being pushed to their limits by Obama's recession and actions he says will fix it, that are obviously only going to make things worse. Those without savings and stability are faced with 'the end of the world" financially, and feel they have no control of their life and nothing to lose.

[returnofthejedi]

So are you excusing their actions? If you say yes, then you should also excuse the actions of innercity kids that are in jail for dealing illegal substances. If you say yes to one and no to the other, you have herby demonstrated the hypocracy of your entire movement. You have shown why it fails in the eyes of America. You have shown why the Republican Party is being laughed off the stage today.

[nevergiveup]

This recession is not Obama's. He inherited it from your guy W and 20 years of re thug rule on Capitol Hill. I believe Gingrich and Phil Graham got the ball rolling on the economic collapse, but it all really started with your hero, Ronald Reagan. Rethugs do not care for their country or fellow countrymen and women. But they love MONEY!

[commonsenselives]

Uh, Jazzman, hate to break this to you: We've been in a recession since way before Obama got elected. Quit trying to put all the blame on someone who just got there.

[tailgateshirts]

It can be started by having talk show and tv hosts that incite violence with their rhetoric, telling people their walls are coming crashing down, theirs minds are going to be controlled by the government and that they need to stockpile guns for the upcoming revolution....

That might be a good start.

[goodforme]

talks haven't just turned into violence when the museum got shot at.

where have you been all these years

when we have been spreading violence (sometimes even without much of a talk) all around the world?