A WORD TO MY ultra-conservative friends:
Many people are having difficulty seeing the connection between your hyped-up rhetoric of recent years and the shooting last Saturday that killed six people and injured Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others.
There's good reason for that difficulty, and it speaks well of the American people—but there is a connection, just not the one we might expect.
The connection we expect, and rightfully reject, is causal.
It's the idea that somehow Sarah Palin putting Democrats in the cross hairs of a rifle, or Sharron Angle's thinly veiled threats about people arming themselves and turning to "second amendment remedies" if they lost at the polls directly caused this shooting.
The evidence for such claims seems thin at the moment, and will probably stay that way.
It's unlikely that the shooter was primarily inspired by Republican rhetoric, or even clearly understood his own reasons for the crime.
We don't blame you for this shooting.
But that doesn't mean there is no connection.
Specifically, it doesn't mean there isn't a spiritual connection.
Conservative politicians and activists have been, in recent years, relying more and more on anger and fear as political tools.
You've motivated your base by escalating your rhetoric in ways that make people afraid and furious.
You didn't simply disagree with Obama's right-of-center health care plan: you called it socialist: bringing up images of a communist takeover of America.
You didn't say Democrats were mistaken, you said they were plotting to take over the country.
You talked of secession from the Union.
You claimed that attempts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children were just the first step to a police state.
You brought up images of citizens arming themselves against the government.
You painted a picture in which violence was a natural, and justified, reaction.
I'm sure that for the most part you didn't mean it literally.
It worked for you politically.
It fired up the base.
Even the one or two of you who went to extremes didn't really think that people would start shooting.
You were, and perhaps still are, living in a kind of fantasy world.
You talk about violence without imagining it.
Without really believing that it could happen.
This incident can't be blamed on you.
But it provides a kind of spiritual object lesson.
An opportunity.
When you talk of "second amendment remedies", when you put your opposition in the cross hairs, when you justify violence for political purposes, you aren't picturing real wounds, real people, real blood.
Here's your chance to stop and take a look at the reality.
At real grief, real wounds, real blood.
This one probably isn't your fault.
But it is what you've been building to—it is what that will look like if you continue.
It's your chance to step out of the fantasy, to step into the real world, and to stop before it's too late.
Take it.
Please.
