After the attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, what can the American people do to bring their politics back to a place where differences don’t devolve into a veritable war against the opposition? According to columnist Peter Craven from Germany’s Berliner Morganpost, “it’s time to revive the rules of civilized coexistence and fair political discourse.”
Even if the background of the bloodbath in Arizona remains unclear, parallels can be noted with Oklahoma. Like McVeigh, suspect Jared Lee L. felt marginalized and excluded. He reportedly read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but also Karl Marx, and he apparently hates Obama and the Democrats. The shot to the head of Gabrielle Giffords can be equated with an attempted execution. It’s also very possible that her Jewish faith played a role. So is this a matter of mentally disturbed individual perpetrators, who, like almost all deranged gunmen and terrorists, exist in a sick parallel universe where revenge is the only thing that matters? And don’t such events inevitably occur from time to time, in the unpredictable manner of a natural disaster?
Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik cannot accept the “cruel coincidence” theory. Dupnik speaks of a social climate of hate and prejudice that further inflames the minds of mentally unstable individuals. In fact, the gambling on Wall Street that average American voters are paying dearly for, the unholy mélange of economic crisis and war, and the damage to the ego that comes along with them, has severely devastated the American soul – and has taken root more deeply than the traumas of Waco, Somalia and the Gulf War that to agitated McVeigh in the mid-nineties.
The election of the first African American to the office of president actually seems to have poisoned the climate in some regions and social strata. … The merciless struggle between cultures should not be allowed to become a behavioral model for domestic politics. Mutual respect is something that the highly dynamic and competition-hardened U.S. democracy owes itself and the world.
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