On January 8^th, 2011, Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords set up a meet-and-greet at a Safeway store in Tucson, Arizona, with the intention of meeting and greeting her constituents. One of them, an unhinged college dropout and Army reject named Jared Loughner, shot her and 18 others, six of whom have since died. One was a nine-year-old girl who had been born on 9/11/01. Giffords is still on life support.

As is usually the case following an unconscionable act, our knee-jerk reflex has been to figure out who's to blame. We rationalize the witch hunt with an implicit conclusion that if we can figure out whose fault this one was, we can take concrete steps to prevent the next one. If we can explain the motives of the murderer, maybe, somehow, that will help us heal or feel more safe.

Right-wing hate speech has been a focal point, despite the fact that neither Loughner nor his insane ravings were aligned with any political party. No doubt, for years, a deluge of horrid talk has been pouring over the airwaves via right-wing talk radio and Fox “News;” no doubt, right-wing political figures and wanna-bes favor lock-and-load, aim-and-fire military metaphors and other metaphors dealing in conflict, taking a stand and smashing one's opponent. Who can blame them? They're just trying to appeal to the baser instincts of their base. It's just propaganda. If it didn't work to rally the people who support them, they would take a different tack.

Requests to sign and pass along petitions and documents of support for more civil speech have made the rounds on Facebook and via e-mail. There is talk of the drafting of bills banning certain kinds of speech in political debate (e.g., crosshairs on maps). Plenty of screeching about the right to free speech has arisen in response. And folks on the Right are pissed off because they think they're being unfairly targeted as rich sources of incendiary language in political debate.

In a recent blog posting ( http://michellemalkin.com/2011/01/10/the-progressive-climate-of-hate-an-illustrated-primer-2000-2010/) conservative journalist Michelle Malkins writes, “Tucson massacre ghouls who are now trying to criminalize conservatism have forced our hand.”

(Oooooooh! Ooooooooh! Such bombast! Ah'm shiverin' in my yoga pants!)

She proceeds to list many examples of left-wing hate speech, including “Abort Sarah Palin” bumper stickers, a Getty image depicting Sarah Palin with a rifle pointed at her head, several videos of Obama supporters behaving badly, a rally poster of George Bush's decapitated head, a photographer's manipulations of a studio portrait of John McCain (one gives him a Dracula-like mouth dripping with blood and another depicts a chimpanzee shitting onto the crown of his head), and mug shots of a few guys arrested for things like throwing tomatoes at Ann Coulter.

Yes, Michelle, there is no shortage of stereotyping, minimizing, mocking or hatred on the left side of the aisle. Although this hate speech doesn't seem to incite as many people who own firearms, we do like to talk about the stupidity of our right-leaning counterparts. This conversation has created some of the funniest television any of us has seen in years. We liberals like to laugh – and not just at World's Funniest Home Videos and Jersey Shore. We like our humor a little more highbrow.

Oops! I just did it myself. See how I dehumanized those other guys? Called 'em stupid? Those guys who think Sarah Palin, Dubya and Reagan are national heroes and who compare Obama to Hitler? Yeah, those guys. The guys who scream and yell about liberals being the death of America. I love to watch and laugh a horrified “oh my God can this really be TRUE?” laugh while Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert eviscerate those guys. I think: Oh those stupid, stupid people.

Keith Olbermann's brilliantly inflammatory histrionics and Bill Maher's liberal-crowd-pandering insults and stereotyping appeal to those of us who want to believe that the problems of our nation are their fault, and that in our superior intelligence we have every right to point fingers and laugh at them.

I hate to be a party-pooper, but in doing so, we're taking an even lower moral road than the Righties. Because we should know better. Still, we cave to the desire to divide and conquer. To make someone else the problem. To make the other an Other – another species, another breed, a bad, bad something we are not and could never become.

If we can step back from this puerile back-and-forth – about who's doing the worst hate speech, the most name-calling – we might actually be able to see the issue in a way that will bring healing. We might be able to honor the wishes of Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." He also said: "Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love." And: "Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

Love is the foundation of a society that doesn't allow someone as obviously mentally ill and unstable as this shooter to go without intensive help. And I'm not talking about a society that cuddles psychopaths or people who have been eaten alive by their own shadow sides, never to emerge whole again. I'm not talking about coddling criminals or unmitigated, self-righteous assholes or even about excusing their wrongdoings. I'm talking about taking care of each other. Of living life with a sense that we are all in this together, and acting accordingly. That if some of us are being treated unjustly or are sick and unable to help themselves, we need to do something to try to help. 

People who knew that Loughner was dangerous keep coming out of the woodwork to have their fifteen minutes of fame. They tell stories about him that remind me of that urban planning acronym NIMBY (Not In My Backyard): Sure, build the nuclear power plant, or the cell phone tower, or the homeless shelter, or the dump for the hazardous wastes, but Not In My Back Yard. Sure, this Loughner guy is probably going to hurt somebody, so I should just get him OOMBY (Out Of My Back Yard) so he doesn't hurt me or anyone I care about. Let somebody else deal with him. Nobody dealt with Loughner except to continually reject, ostracize and marginalize him.

How could he have been helped? Help might have come in psychiatric, spiritual or familial forms, from a community that sees the loving and lovable heart in every person, or from some other source. However it had come, it would have been our best chance at protecting the people he ended up harming.

Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of a fierce kind of love that has, at its root, a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, and a valuation of the interdependent web of life in which we all exist – a valuation that trumps individual interests. This kind of love sees God in everything while at the same time demanding accountability, interaction and cooperation. And when people are too broken to help themselves, real love presses the rest of us to intervene in some way before their brokenness breaks others. 

Conservative icon Ronald Reagan famously said that "we must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions." But there is no individual apart from society. Society births us, feeds us, grows us, and influences what we become in ways that are too strong to tease apart from our astrological, genetic or past-life tendencies.

Sure, some of us come in with much bigger burdens than others, and we are accountable for what we do with those burdens – whether we surpass them, allow our broken selves to be vessels of light instead of denizens of darkness. But to truly live out King's version of love, we must recognize that if we were born into the life of of a criminal,  asshole or psychopath, we could just as easily have ended up with that weapon in our hands, pointing it at a public servant in front of a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona.

We don't have to befriend people who have given themselves over to a darkness that terrifies us. But we do have to risk joining together to protect those people from themselves, and to protect ourselves from them. 

Until we see that Loughner is not other than us—and that Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Dubya, and all those other Others—are our brothers and sisters, and that no one gets to win the arguments we're currently having, the pointless pissing matches will continue. Who will stop first? This isn't about preventing anyone from buying firearms and killing innocents. It's a crisis of humanity. We are ceasing to see each other as real human beings in all our frail, powerful, paradoxical glory. We're making each other into stereotypes, pointing at those cardboard-cutout substitutes for actual people, and shouting and screaming and name-calling and laughing. Denying each other's humanity, each other's blood-filled, beating hearts, makes it so much easier for us to hurt each other.

Put away your pissing parts, people. Let's ask ourselves what we are doing to perpetuate an atmosphere of strife and violence. None of us are innocent. Let's admit, this, accept it, and try to love each other and have some civil debate already.

It might not make such good television. I, for one, would weep to see Colbert and Stewart go off the air (and I'd dance with joy to see Limbaugh disappear). But debate around issues of politics, human rights, the economy, health care and the like should not be like an episode of [insert name of your favorite reality show here].

Let's not be the populace that can be manipulated by drama and propaganda. Once our elected officials and the media mouthpieces see that this shit won't work on us anymore, they'll class up their acts, and fast.