January 12, 2011
“In later years, when someone asked Thornton Wilder about his purpose in writing THE BRIDGE, he replied that he was posing a question: "Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?"
Thornton Wilder Society
Dear Friends,
I remember as though it were yesterday, reading Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge at San Luis Rey” in a high school English Literature course and being captivated by the haunting questions it raised for a young man just beginning to wrestle with existential uncertainty.
For those who have not read Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, or who may have forgotten its simple plot, it centers on the collapse of Peru’s most famous bridge nearly 300 years ago, taking the lives of the five people who happened to be traversing it as it gave way. A Franciscan monk, Brother Juniper, narrowly escaped the same fate, and was inspired by the experience to explore his belief that it was a providential act of God.
Juniper spent the next six years engaged in a search for all he could learn about the lives of these five people, believing that this would help him “justify the ways of God to man,” and to prove God’s existence.
As the awful news broke last Saturday morning about the victims of the Tucson shooting, the questions of San Luis Rey came flooding back.
Why them? Why now? What brought them to the sidewalk outside a Safeway in a Tucson neighborhood?
Who was this assassin? A man with a political agenda? A victim of economic dislocation -- no job, home foreclosed, broke? A psychopath?
Was this about our politics? The result of escalating, overheated, polarizing, personalized polemics?
Was it a sign of some sort? And if so, what might it signal?
In the hours that have passed since Jared Loughner’s act of mass violence -- 20 injured or killed -- we have learned more about the lives of the victims, the psychological instability of the shooter, and what brought each of them to the same place at the same moment.
It’s what we don’t know, and probably can never know, that haunts us.
Why is this so?
Perhaps because the things we might have first imagined turned out not to be at work in Tucson.
The assassin wasn’t a political fanatic.
This wasn’t a confrontation between warring partisans on immigration.
It wasn’t about race or ethnicity.
It had nothing to do with global jihad.
It was, however, a metaphorical collision between the 1st and 2nd amendments.
It was probably the act of a loner -- a young man plagued by paranoid schizophrenia or some other psychotic malady.
It was just another Saturday for those who assembled peaceably outside the Safeway until madness intruded, and then it was a nightmare for twenty Arizonans and their families, and finally for the nation as well.
The search for causality in Tucson or San Luis Rey is an expression of a basic human need -- to understand, to make sense out of, to find some redeeming or damning value, to divine some meaning.
It is also one of those moments when shibboleths of every persuasion are dragged out, carried through the town square, aired ad nauseam, and, with good luck, retired when they have failed to provide the metaphysical fodder for the inexplicable or when they are an expedient twisting of the anecdotal into something posing as fact.
For many, there is hope that this might inch us toward a more civil public conversation and away from the sometimes-poisonous invective that has been with us for too long, and which makes challenging and often contentious public issues more difficult to resolve.
However, imagining that this will influence those who earn their living by engaging in the asinine excess of the right to free speech would be folly. They will soldier on, undeterred by the thought that they are part of a debasement process and comforted by the conviction that they “stand” for all that is good and right and “American.”
Fortunately, they aren’t the problem, although they are insufferable and indigestible, and, despite their fondest wishes, irrelevant, even in their flagrant irresponsibility.
But if our response to Tucson improved the public discourse by even a wee dram when and where citizens gather to express themselves on politics and public policy that would be progress, however slow or uncertain.
If it induced Congress to consider conducting annual bipartisan retreats modeled on the ones that Congressmen David Skaggs (D-CO) and Ray LaHood (R-IL) initiated in the late 1990s, but which died out for lack of interest, that would be a hopeful sign.
And if it allowed a reasoned reconsideration of our patchwork of federal and state gun laws, that would be a fitting testament to the victims of mass killings ranging from Columbine to Virginia Tech to Ft. Hood and Tucson.
There is much more than can be done, and this would be a good time to begin.
But despite deep convictions that Tucson and its antecedents are canaries in America’s political mine shaft, their profoundly disturbing message is mostly about mental illness, and the extent to which we have withdrawn public resources from dealing with its devastating effect on a society that wishes it gone. But which anguishes visibly and vocally each time another 33-round clip or two rings out in another of those “it could never happen here . . .” places.
I suppose that almost everyone has a thought or two about what might emerge from this tragic event in Tucson that would nudge us in the direction of a tomorrow that is more compassionate, generous, and worthy of a great nation.
Brother Juniper hoped that his research would prove the existence of God, and that our lives are lived at His will. And for his efforts, he and his book were burned to ashes.
We can do better. And we can begin now.
R. Garrett Mitchell
The Mitchell Report
January 12, 2011
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