Dangerous metaphors
I’ve now had a day and night to process my projections on the events of yesterday in Tucson. I’m grieving, with the sense that we, as a democracy, have been attacked, and at the same time mourning for the individuals who were present at the shooting—including those who died, were physically injured, and the eyewitnesses who were psychically scarred. I include in my mourning the young man with the gun, so lost to his own paranoia that he could believe that acting on such a violent impulse was the right thing to do.
My first projection on hearing the news through links posted on Facebook was that this is what hatemongering leads to. An interesting, and civil, discussion of other points of view ensued on my Facebook post about it. One friend said that this young man should have been helped, and his access to weaponry was a failure of our mental health care system and the regulation of gun ownership. Another friend argued with me that we shouldn’t point fingers at Palin—that we don’t have to look far to find a long history of gun metaphors in our political and sports discourse.
My friends are right, and indeed, in the hours that followed, blogs and commentators plunged deep into the recognition that our political speech has gotten too militant to be in agreement with one of the basic principals of our constitution: the peaceful transition of power. I’m not naïve; I know that despite our ideals, our history has far too many examples of assassination and murder influencing political course. Yet we have to recognize that words have the power to shape our shared understanding of the world in which we live, and the ideas that gain traction in our discourse find ways to manifest in our physical lives.
JasonAshlock on Twitter commented that Sarah Palin was guilty “of the irresponsible use of metaphor.” He captures the point exactly. Politicians have long recognized the power of language. Ad agencies know how crucial just the right slogan is. Poets understand the layers of meaning within word choice. Dream readers imagine the whole dream as a metaphor for waking life situations.
To buy into violence is to choose the destructive, rather than the creative, path. If we are to survive as a species, we’ll need to be creative to solve our problems. We’ll have to find compassion for the wounded, the sick, the criminal. We’ll have to change our public discourse. For too long, we’ve let penny-pinchers tell us we should keep what we possess at the expense of others, leaving too many in our society hungry, literally and metaphorically. Too many are excluded from contributing their talents because of poverty or skin color or any of the hundreds of ways we classify “otherness.”
We are a creative people. Let’s start using gardening metaphors instead of war metaphors. Instead of trying to “beat” the opponent, let’s try to “grow” support for our own candidate or idea. Let’s dream up a new way of envisioning our world.
January 10th, 2011 at 11:19 am
Amen! Very well put! Thank you.
February 4th, 2011 at 10:55 pm
Is there ever a situation where violence is creative? I think there is. I don’t presume to know what that situation might be; I might not even be able to envision it; but if I’ve learned anything these many years, it’s this: absolutes do not become this reality.
Hmm. Let me try.
(Stretches mental fingers …)
The sun is violent, is it not? And yet through its nuclear fury–contained violence, but violence nonetheless–life became possible and took hold here on earth.
Supernovae produce as much energy in their final uncontained explosive fury as an entire galaxy produces in a year. But in that violence comes the very seeds of life: the heavy elements necessary for it to exist.
Childbirth can be, and often is, quite violent. But we celebrate with happy tears the consequences soon after, do we not?
The violence of the predator–the wolf, the lion, the cobra: can we claim that their path is destructive and not creative?
It seems to me that not only can violence be creative, but that being creative sometimes requires violence. Sometimes great violence.
I would say that the Tucson shooter was a victim, at minimum, of rhetoric spewed by his chosen political party, of his own mental illness, and by the utter laxity of Arizona gun-control laws. His violence was indeed quite destructive and horrific, and he should pay for his crimes with the severest measures available under the law; but even here we must step back and look at what comes out of his idiocy: even in his desire to destroy, creation still manages to wiggle in and take hold: witness the shamefacedness of some of the less vile Republicans on the Hill following; witness the harsh spotlight on Arizona in general, and its neverending hash of fringe, race-baiting, gun-loving, Democrat-hating radio blather; witness the one or two Republicans now calling for a ban on some makes of automatic weaponry. And so on.
As Emerson rightly said, justice is not postponed. I agree with him.
I hope this finds you doing well, Laura. I drop by your Site every now and again to check in and read your latest blogs. I hope your writing is coming along, too.
:–)
Best to you,
Shawn Montaigne (Helbert)
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February 5th, 2011 at 11:10 am
Thanks, Shawn, for your thoughtful reply. You raise interesting points, worthy of discussion. I agree that the predator’s path looks destructive, and yet we need to recognize the life cycle inherent in the hunt for food. And sometimes, even in artistic creation, there’s an internal violence that must be experienced to break through self-imposed barriers to one’s inner life. I also recognize that events like random shootings can bring people together and wake us up to the world we’ve created for ourselves. But the praise for the good outcomes will always be tinged with grief for what is lost.
Thanks for stopping by. Best to you, too.
Laura