Hearing what the Tea Party Express had to say today about the Arizona murders and assassination attempt just made me... sad. I should know better - I should know not to expect compassion or reflection from such as they. But honestly - having been in Washington DC on 9/11 and having seen the overwhelming spirit of kindness, patience and compassion that followed, I had allowed my hope to rise.
It was crushed. More over the fold.
I haven't talked much about my stepson here. He's an adult now - and he has five years of clean living and struggle and work under his belt. But the time he lived with us - from age 11 to age 20 - well, it was difficult. Anyone who has lived with a drug and/or alcohol addict knows what I'm talking about.
Mr. RenaRF and I have never done drugs (ok - I smoked pot when I was 23, 20 years ago, but that was it, and Mr. RenaRF has literally never touched drugs, cigarettes or alcohol). In a way, I think that makes spotting a drug user a bit more difficult, especially if that particular drug user is someone you love and someone you want desperately to believe is not using drugs or alcohol. I'm not going to go into the whole story of discovering my stepson's drug use or what we did or the frustration and fear and pain it caused our family. Rather, I'd like to briefly touch on how it finally dawned on me in particular that there was a major problem.
It began with the lies. Not whoppers - just smallish ones that would ring uncomfortably in my ears, even though I couldn't specifically call them out as "lie". Over time, I realized they were lies, and I called my stepson out on it. He would back down, back away, hem and haw, and smooth things over. When it finally came down to discovering The Big Lie (essentially, stepson had been arrested and there was no way to hide that), he came clean verbally and told us about his drug use. Again - won't go into specifics here, but with the exception of crack and regular (is there such a thing as a "regular" drug?) cocaine, he'd pretty much abused it.
What commenced was a period of "straight living" for him. We took him to NA meetings. We found him local counseling programs. He refused in-patient treatment (he was over 18 when this particular chunk of shit hit the fan, so we couldn't make him go), but appeared, for a period of time, to be trying to shake the monkey off of his back and get his life in order. But then things... changed. Back to that tickle in my ears, which I was MUCH more attuned to and which I confronted right away.
When confronted, his tactic was to push back - to decry blame, to rail about the unfairness of dragging all of his good work and honest attempts to such a dark place. He never really articulated that he fully understood and owned how we would continue to question him (regardless of whether we were right nor not) - and the reason he didn't was because he didn't reflect on his past bad actions enough to really internalize the effect it had on his family. And without that reflection, he hadn't learned, he hadn't kicked his habit (just temporarily stopped it), and he eventually picked up his monkey and went on down the road from us.
As I said - that life and those issues are now five years behind him and he's come through it both alive and unincarcerated. But it was he that I thought of when I heard this statement on CNN earlier:
One thing that surprised us [after the shooting] was how many in the news media and liberal political figures and organizations immediately launched into an attack on the tea party movement - assigning blame for the shooting to our grass roots, Constitutionalist movement in general, and Gov. Sarah Palin in particular.
Friends, this is outrageous.
It is quite clear that liberals are trying to exploit this shooting for their own political benefit, and they used deception and dishonesty to try and smear all of us and our beliefs.
You know what the truth is? The truth is that the shooter, Jared Loughner is the one responsible for this atrocity. But liberals are trying to place the blame on society for embracing the tea party movement.
We here at the Tea Party Express find that disgusting and revolting. ...
It brought me back to dealing with my stepson when he was at his worst, in the grips of a destructive alternate reality. When I would question him, he would push back in the most ridiculous ways, utterly missing the point. This Tea Party Express statement is so hauntingly similar to that.
Should I even bother to refute the bolded statement? The left and media and random people weren't accusing the shooter of being a Tea Party member (though it was possible, as possible as his being an anarchist or whatever). They were accusing organizations like the Tea Party and public personalities like Sarah Palin of putting into place the type of toxic environment that allows a borderline person to carry murderous fantasies to fruition. "2nd Amendment remedies" (ala Sharron Angle) for Harry Reid isn't funny in this climate. It can take a person who is zealous and unbalanced and convince them that shooting Harry Reid is the right, Patriotic, American Constitutional thing to do. When Sarah Palin says "Don't Retreat - RELOAD!" and then places rifle-scope crosshairs on a map and associates those crosshairs with an actual person, a person who is zealous and unbalanced can become convinced that harming any of those people thusly "marked" is the right, patriotic, American Constitutional thing to do. When the Tea Party Express leaders describe our President as "our half white, racist President", when Tea Party favorite Carl Palladino verbally threatens a reporter and shows up to concede with a baseball bat in his hand, when a so-called movement encourages - and plans and enables - angry shouting matches at town hall meetings, a person is who is zealous and unbalanced just might possibly believe that becoming violent is a right, patriotic, American and Constitutional thing to do.
It's not that anyone is saying Loughner is a tea partier or that the tea party or Palin or Angle or Palladino or Williams or countless others who provide numerous, despicable examples personally retained him to attempt an assassination of Giffords. They didn't. But their rhetoric - their willingness to win by inflaming fear and hatred - definitely contributes.
If they were reflective - and if they GAVE A FLYING SHIT - they would carefully point out that Loughner has no ties to the Tea Party but also allow that everyone should be more conscientious about what they say and the unintended effect that words can have.
They were so like my stepson in that moment - defensive, utterly unwilling to accept even tangential culpability - that it just made me sad. Because when we had to put our stepson out of the house, when every other alternative had been exhausted, we did so with bowed backs and without knowing if we'd ever see him alive again. But we also knew that this was the position he'd put us in.
I felt that broken-backed sadness today when I heard their statement. Because what's walking out the door this time, to me, seems to be any chance at civility. What's walking in the door seems to be a new and heightened sense that we are truly living in dangerous times.
It made me profoundly sad.