The first time I saw that Carl Pierson, the perpetrator in the latest Colorado school shooting, was a socialist was on the liberal message board Democratic Underground. To be fair, the only other places I’ve seen the words socialist attached to him are places that benefit politically by calling attention to his political beliefs.
The Denver Post has said that Pierson ridiculed Republicans on his Facebook page, and that he was politically aligned with Keynesian economic policy. It’s a decent, but untested (at this point) bet that if he’d been politically conservative, considerable wondering would occur about how far the trail of blood extended back to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Fox News. (And, to be fair, a lot of conservatives are probably vocalizing the same curiosity about blood trails and Rachel Maddow, Alan Grayson [who Pierson paraphrased on Facebook], and MSNBC.)
But this isn’t about whether Carl Pierson’s political beliefs and the people who agree with him are responsible for his actions. It’s not really about him at all.
It’s about us.
It’s about how Carl Pierson’s actions aren’t going to be about Carl Pierson. It’s about how every tragedy from September 11 to Sandy Hook to this becomes a political football. The simple fact is, Carl Pierson’s political beliefs didn’t handle a shotgun last week. He did. A disillusioned teenaged boy with a history of threatening behavior got a shotgun–something not typically included in gun-control discussions, by the way–and used it to handle a disagreement.
One of the things many of the people on Democratic Underground are proud of is going into a place of business and seeing Fox News on television and demanding that it be changed. Alan Grayson, a hero of the politically engaged liberal is famous (or infamous) for saying that Republican’s want you to die quickly if you get sick.
On the other hand, Rush Limbaugh called a woman a slut, primarily because she disagreed with him politically. (He doesn’t say that if she’s conservative.) This is a man with a talent for making me angry at him when I agree with him.
The simple fact of the matter is morality is not a value of political stance. No political position has a monopoly on moral righteousness. Money from political allies corrupts MSNBC’s Ed Schulz as much as Rush or Glenn Beck. Sometimes unions care as little about their members as management. And sometimes the demands of either side pass over into a form of political fundamentalism that stifles freedom and real solutions.
Your worth as a person isn’t based on your position on gay marriage, abortion, gun rights, or the proper name of the Washington DC NFL football team. People of good will disagree on these things. But people of good will find a way to find common ground even with people who confound them politically.
In an environment in which political purists reduce “the other side” to something less than human, it shouldn’t be a surprise that shootings are sometimes politically motivated.
Next time one of the shootings happens, before you look at TV for the culprit, look in the mirror first.
Chris Hamilton's Stuff 