We all know that on January 8, 2011 Christina Taylor Green tragically became the latest poster child for the wrongness of violence. It has been irresistible to the national media to draw out the parallel coincidences of her birth date and the manner of her death.
I was so afraid that Obama would engage in the same shameless easy exploitation; and so hopeful that he would take a deeper perspective when he brought up a name it would have been unavoidable and inappropriate to omit at the memorial service in Tuscon. He did not disappoint.
But the media did.
This was the money shot in Obama's speech at the Tucson memorial service today:
"Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations."
This is the part of the speech that got the most fervent audience response. Their applause after this statement was the most enthusiastic and sustained of his entire presentation.
And yet the pundits, even on MSNBC, virtually ignored this point in their subsequent "in-depth" analyses. Why?
The president's words about honoring the idealism of a murdered child by trying to live up to it brought tears to my eyes. If this isn't what we are supposed to be doing in this country, what is?
The fastest way for a talking head on the evening influence box to lose his or her perspective is to forget, even temporarily, that every single thing we do is supposed to make a better society and a better world for the children who trust us to do so. There is no exception to this. It's a moral imperative, and a natural law.
But when Obama uses his bully pulpit and powerful rhetorical skills to remind us of this basic truth as a lesson to be treasured like a gift from the grave, the media passes over it. Like attention-deficit disordered crows picking into picnics, they flit from one shiny morsel on the table to another, never minding about the most substantial but perhaps less flashy main dish. Was it because that one consisted of boring intractable things like responsibility to innocent idealism?
Ahem. That's what an ideal is, remember? It is something we are supposed to be trying to attain. We are supposed to nourish and make real the idealistic dreams of our children, the dreams that we ourselves planted in their heads. You know the ones. They're about how democracy works best when we participate, how public service is an honor, and how anyone can change the world, anyone can make a positive difference, if only they will jump in and try.
There is no other reason to build a nation or fix roads or enact laws or, frankly, to get up in the morning, than to try make things better for those who come next. To ignore this is to miss the point of being here.
But the pundits did. They missed the point. They got distracted by the opportunity to talk about who didn't show up at the memorial and who thrust themselves into the spotlight to capitalize on it. In other words, they chose to do the very thing Obama asked them not to do, to recriminate and spin, instead of lesson-take, and win-win.
Undoubtedly, there were many cogent points to Obama's speech at the Tucson memorial service. But the point that truly inspired, the one that was most worthy of his eloquence and of our embrace, was the very genuine desire of the world's most powerful man to live up to the very reasonable expectations of a passionate little girl.