Symbols and Death and All of This

Horrible things happened in Tucson this past weekend. You know this, of course. And you know what followed – the mourning, yes, but also the finger pointing, the political gamesmanship of fixing blame. This wasn’t just the usual human need to find something to repair whenever something so tragically breaks, but a markedly political need to “win” something or to “not lose” something, both “sides” turning tragedy into an opportunity to play politics, to “prove” the veracity of their particular world view, or prove the invalidity of their opponent’s.

I use quotations there. Because there are no sides except those we artificially impose and there is no proof for ideology. We create these concepts because, without them, there appears to be no order . We generate symbols (these right here that I’m using to write with and other symbols like flags and peace signs and entire people and movements) and we manipulate these symbols to force meaning into our world. And this is okay, of course. Necessary. What is writing but the creation of meaning out of abstraction?

But here’s the thing, here’s what I believe: nothing is as simple as our structures often lead us to believe. A human being doesn’t walk into a grocery store and shoot another human being in the head because yet another human being used gun sights in an advertisement. Sure, those gun sights and other symbols may have filtered in to the killer’s paranoid psyche and maybe in some unknowable, unverifiable way those symbols contributed to the act.

It’d be easy to believe this. Because symbols are power, right? Because symbols are the way we organize our reality? But let’s not fool ourselves about what words and symbols really are. It’s all nothing more than artifice. Than construct. What truly exists can never be captured in symbols. Yes – hell yes – we need more civility, more consideration, more compassion in our modern discourse. And, hell yes, hate breeds hate and there's never a wrong moment to condemn those who demonize, who divide, who callously ruin. But in all this conversation about the power of words – of symbols – I think it’s important to remember that all words and all symbols will always fall short of truth.

Some things defy our attempts at order. Some things exist outside categorization. Some things are, by their nature, incomprehensible. And I think it’s okay to admit that.