On Friday, I joked that people should have to spend one day a year wearing their internet comments on a sandwich board. On Saturday, a man walked up to a United States Congresswoman and shot her through the head. He shot an wounded 17 other people, and killing six. Among the dead was a 9-year-old girl who’d wanted to meet the politician because she’d recently been elected to her student council.
We don’t know the killer’s motives yet, but most speculation centers around his political writings about big government and the gold standard. Because we live in an era where everyone has a public persona, we all have access to the killer’s list of favorite books: a mish-mash political, economic, and dystopian literature. Much of his personal history has led to the belief that he suffers from a mental disorder, possibly schizophrenia, and that this is the reason for his actions.
Many on the left side of the nation’s political divide (where I sit) have pointed fingers toward the more vitriolic comments on the right, singling out former Vice-Presidential candidate turned celebritician Sarah Palin and her use of gun metaphors (“Don’t retreat, reload” and a campaign image of Congressional districts, including the victims’, marked with apparent rifle scope crosshairs).
I don’t know why the killer acted. No one does, and based on history, I’d say it’s likely we’ll never know the whole truth. Personally, I doubt that the killer was motivated by something as straightforward as a media figure’s words. He seems to have gone deep into the rabbit hole before his rampage, and I suspect his reading ran deeper than Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck. On the other hand, I think it’s very possible that his choice of target, a woman who seems tangential at best to the killer’s seeming obsession with currency, was the result of something like Palin’s crosshairs graphic.
And while I don’t think Sarah Palin is responsible for creating a killer, it does appear that among her first responses to Saturday’s tragedy was to remove the image from her website, and to begin spinning the crosshairs as “surveyor’s symbols” once it was clear that she’d never be able to hide it from the internet.
Which brings me back to my joke about internet comments and sandwich boards.
I’m a First Amendment guy. It’s near sacred text to me, and I would never support legal remedies for violent or stupid rhetoric. One of the things that sets America apart from many other Western democracies* is our no-holds-barred approach to free speech, especially political speech. In America, if you can think it, then you can pretty much say it without fear of reprisal.
But just because you’re not legally responsible for the words you use, or their possible effects, doesn’t mean you aren’t morally responsible for them, and make no mistake, words have power. As a weapon or a tool, there is nothing more effective than words for motivating human beings. If you don’t believe me, then reflect on the fact that all of the major religions of the world are built on sacred texts, and that according to the Gospel of John, Christians worship a word “made flesh.”
So, while I don’t want to ban anyone from saying anything ever, I do think the world would be a little better off if we all remembered the power of our words and realized that, for better or worse, the words we speak or write are very often the only things we’re known by.
Do you really want to wonder in the aftermath of a tragedy whether your words were throwing fuel on the fire, or spend time deleting tweets rather than comforting the grieving? And before you hit the “post” button on that latest internet rant, bear in mind that you could be writing your epitaph.
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*I’m thinking specifically of the UK’s bad libel laws and the French tendency to ban head scarves. Canada also has a history of banning books that were sold openly in the United States, and of course Australia is dead set on censoring the internet.
