Before we begin, I have to make one thing absolutely crystal clear :

Nothing I am about to say, in any way, shape, or form, violates the principle of freedom of speech that we quite rightfully hold sacred in modern pluralistic democratic society. I am suggesting no new laws, I am proposing no new government policies. I am not suggesting your fellow citizens rise up and do anything.

In short, I am not, in any way or on any level, suggesting that anyone should control or coerce what a person says, writes, or otherwise expresses any more than the current accepted standard in your nation and/or culture. The only force in the world which should restrain your expression of your ideas and beliefs is your conscience, and I am, I repeat, not suggesting anything else imaginable.

If, despite this strenuous and probably entirely excessive preamble, you insist upon thinking I have said something in this article that violates your freedom of speech in any way, then you are either being deliberately disingenuous in order to make my points easier for you to argue against, or you are too thick in the head to actually read and comprehend what I am saying and are merely compulsively squirting out words in response to the emotional potentials created by certain buzzwords in your primitive brain.

Either way, I don’t give one single tiny damn about what you think about what I say.

Many of you will have already figured out what I am going to talk about.

After the Tuscon Massacre yesterday, the full sphere of public opinion is vibrating with debate over freedom of speech and the far less popular and famous implied responsibility that such freedom entails.

The question is “How much responsibility do the people who use and spread very, very angry and violent rhetoric about a person or group of people bear for the actions of a lone lunatic who takes their words very literally and commit terrible acts like the Tuscon Massacre based on them?”

The answer, or rather my answer anyhow, is : “Legally, none whatsoever. Morally, a very small and subtle but very real amount. ”

Clearly, the perpetrator of this horror is a deeply disturbed and unhinged individual. His public writing and videos are disjointed, confused, rambling, and incoherent. To me, this clearly points to someone with a serious mental illness, possibly paranoid schizophrenia or psychosis, and so arguably, it is pointless to hold people responsible for the acts of someone who is quite likely non compis mentis in the first place and hence not even legally or morally culpable for their own actions.

Still, there is such a thing as temperature level in public debate, with different eras and different spheres of debate lying on a spectrum between the completely calm, reasonable debate which promotes mutual understanding and respect, and well…. now, honestly.

In my nearly 40 years on this globe, I have never seen anything like what the right wing routinely says about its opponents. Anyone not completely in line with the Fox News approved line of received wisdom is vile, evil, less than human, a mere freshy shell for a heartless demon bent on destruction of everything good and sacred for no other reason than to please their black and withered hearts, which pump not blood but pure liquid evil through their bodies.

Nowhere is the other side given even the most basic forms of respect. Democrats and liberals don’t even deserve to live, let alone have a right to their own differing opinion and the respect due to fellow Americans with whom you share a culture and a nation and a long history of freedom. The concept that “we all have the same goals but differ on the method” is long gone.

And nobody can claim that they have never heard of a case where violent and aggressive rhetoric had caused some lone lunatic, or group of them (Oklahoma City), to do terrible things. So nobody can claim complete ignorance of the potential consequences of choosing the more extreme, intolerant, and counter-modern path in public debate.

So everyone who promotes this kind of hate-filled and dehumanizing rhetoric shares some form of responsibility. It is the diffuse responsibility of people in a riot or person-crushing stadium crowds in a panic, but the responsibility is there, nevertheless.

It’s easy to point at Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News and blame them for the whole thing, and no doubt about it, their share of the blame is bigger than someone who merely write the occasional cranky rambling letter to the editor of their local newspaper.

But when a crowd goes bad, you can’t just blame the ringleaders. All must bear the burden of blame. There is no speaker or media outlet so powerful and so persuasive that they can make people do or say things against their will.

Hopefully, the eagerness with which the left wing pundits are picking up the Tuscon Massacre and using it as a cudgel against their long time foes will not entirely dilute the potential impact that this event might have in rectifying the grave imbalance that had driven the American right wing well past the point of insanity and create that vital teachable, reachable moment where sanity and moderation can kick in and start to push back against the pandemonium.

It would be far too easy for this terrible tragedy to have no lasting effect because the parties involved get caught up in slugging it out over minutiae and trivia instead of us on the left simply giving the right wing the time and space they need to think about what they have done.

That is what is required in order for some good to come of this terrible tragedy.

I hope that we have the wisdom and courage to learn from it.