The Poetic Injustice of Tucson and Jared Loughner

I aim not to romanticize the unimaginable acts of Jared Loughner in Tucson on January 8, 2011, but I can't help but find irony embedded in the wound of that day. Loughner was clearly out there. We don't know what he was thinking, nor would we understand it if we did. He was hanging somewhere between nightmare and passion, and was pinned in between idealism and polarized rhetoric.

Loughner wrote some strange mosaics of ideas into You Tube videos shortly before his heinous acts. He spoke about being a sleepwalker, being brainwashed, and having the government control his grammar. He seemed to link grammar to currency, and he asked the reader to assume responsibility for his own punctuation and "currency." In vindictive rantings about the community college which asked him to leave and get a psychological evaluation before returning, he labeled the students as illiterate.

"Sadly," he extolled, "only 5% of Americans are dreamers."

What does all that currency and grammar talk mean? Nothing much, because if Loughner was a Schizophrenic, his mind was bending information in odd ways; however, scrape away the grammatical refraction of his insanity to find some dark poetry in the mess of this event.

Jared Loughner believed the government was brainwashing us by controlling grammar. For whatever that means, the conversation that ensued after his shootings revolved around words. While people such as Sarah Palin could not have possibly been responsible for that attack, their words can certainly contribute to the polarity of our country. They are not the only ones responsible for the mess, though. It's the mainspring of popular political media huts such as MSNBC and FOX news that has polarized our nation to such an extent that civil conversation has fallen into a bloody pool at the feet of our ballot casting citizens.

If you are a democrat, you are an unpatriotic, socialist, lazy, idiot. If you are a republican, you are either a patsy for big corporations, or a lying corporate greedy idiot. Either way, most people cannot find the ability to match wits in conversation on how to handle the problems of our nation without conceding what each party is about: Democrats are socially liberal and believe in spending on programs, and republicans believe in decreasing taxes, being socially conservative, and helping big business provide jobs. Whether a pure approach from either perspective really works is debatable, but because we align with one or the other, we chance hatred and vitriol from some opposing person.

Democrats and Republicans should not be enemies. They should be balancing forces in our congress! The fact that the verbiage in politics has become so sharp and divisive should leave us unsettled with how unsurprising that it is that insane people might be inspired by the culmination of that language. The government is brainwashing the people with its use of language. It is time for us to take it back, and no, I'm not defending Jared Loughner . For the victims, though, ought we not aim to decrease the potential for such reactions?