Hate

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was doing something routine in Tucson, Arizona last weekend. She was meeting constituents in front of a shopping center when a gunman stepped forward and shot her in the head.

The Democratic legislator is now fighting for her life in intensive care. Seven others in the crowd were killed. Twenty in all were shot by an apparently deranged gunman before he was tackled by the crowd and prevented from reloading his automatic pistol. He could have killed more were it not for the heroism of ordinary citizens, including a retired army officer and a 61-year old woman.

Yet another mindlessly tragic spectacle has happened. A shocked American nation is asking many questions in the wake of this senseless attack.

Arizona, for one, is known for its relaxed gun laws. The gunman, in this case, was able to procure a gun and carry the concealed weapon despite having failed a mental fitness test when he applied for military service. Privacy laws prevented gun sellers from acquiring neuropsychiatric information about the buyers.

A strong lobby group, supported by socially conservative politicians, resisted the passage of more stringent rules governing gun ownership. Those social conservatives have, lately, escalated the hateful rhetoric plaguing American political discourse at this time.

Rep. Giffords is a Democrat in a part of the US where social conservatism is strong. Although a Democrat, she does not stand out as what conservatives might call a “liberal” in the dialect of American politics. She is married to a military officer who served in Iraq and is due, in his current career as an astronaut, to command the next space shuttle mission.

Nevertheless, Gabby Giffords found herself, along with 19 other Democratic congressional candidates, in a particularly distasteful ad put out by Sarah Palin and her followers in the conservative Tea Party movement. The ad had photos of the Democratic congressmen on crosshairs, as they would appear through the sights of a sniper.

The 20 Democratic congressmen were specially targeted in the successful Republican campaign that saw the party retake control of the US House of Representatives. Giffords, despite Arizona being a conservative red state, was able to retain her seat at the House. Most of the other Democratic candidates targeted by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party lost their seats.

Giffords supported Obama’s landmark health care reform legislation. The current Republican majority at the US Congress promised to repeal that new law, although they will most likely be blocked by a Senate that remains under Democratic control. Nevertheless, the debate on health care reform remains a divisive issue in the US and a key item in the hateful rhetoric of the social conservatives.

Moments after the attack on Giffords, the Tucson sheriff blamed the violent act on the politics of hate that seems to have overwhelmed American political discourse. That sets the more prominent theme trying to grapple with the distress this attack brings to a shocked nation.

To be sure, there is no evidence the gunman is particularly ideological. All evidence in fact indicates he is not even coherent. His emails are garbled and nonsensical.

It is also true, however, that the feeble-minded are most vulnerable to hateful rhetoric. They are not equipped to sort out issues reasonably. They are prone to commit senseless violence.

Just last week, a provincial governor in Pakistan was gunned down by one of his own bodyguards. The governor refused stiffer penalties on utterance deemed blasphemous by Islamic fundamentalists. The bodyguard, by all indications an unintelligent man, deemed his own boss an ally of blasphemy and saw it his sacred duty to gun him down.

The people who inhabit Malacañang Palace might do well to pay close attention to this on-going global deliberation about hateful speech and senseless acts of violence. There seems to be a more entrenched pattern in the President’s speeches: when he has nothing particularly important to say, he launches into some provocative attack on his imagined enemies.

In a speech late last year, the President, entirely out of the blue, warned his critics that their days are numbered. In last week’s speech (the shortest on record) at the traditional New Year’s reception at the Palace, the President launched into an unprovoked attack against the minority legislators.

Such unprovoked outbursts in the President’s speeches might be conveniently blamed on Mai Mislang, the wine connoisseur, who is said to draft these things. But the President has not shown the good sense to skip them or scratch them out.

As we saw in Tucson, such rhetoric could incite the most feeble-minded into committing the most tragic acts.

Seasonal

The much-observed quarterly SWS hunger survey shows a worsening picture of the state of public welfare. Involuntary hunger continues to rise. The last numbers for the fourth quarter of 2010 shows hunger incidence spiking.

The persistently worsening hunger numbers tell us that the problem is structural and requires hard work over a sustained period to adequately address. The President’s men, however, think things will get better instantly just because there is a new administration in place.

Presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda appears to be taking the new SWS hunger numbers as a political affront. He publicly surmises, without evidence to do so, that the Q4 numbers are probably due to “seasonal” factors. Blaming the worsening hunger numbers on “seasonal” factors is a convenient way to exculpate the Aquino administration from perception that, apart from constantly talking, it has actually done nothing to date.

I earnestly hope Lacierda finds some evidence to support his unscientific suspicions. That will be reassuring.

Otherwise, I will go with Mahar Mangahas’ observation that the incidence of hunger appears to be worsening in the urban areas, making geography, not seasonality, the main explanative factor.