See, it’s not really a war

Special Commentary by Chris Graham
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I’m a Unitarian – if I can say that going every so often to the local Unitarian Universalist fellowship makes me a Unitarian.

Actually, those who know even just a little about Unitarians at all understand perfectly well how Unitarian that makes me.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you also know how much of a target I am.

“He felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets. Because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement … he would then target those that had voted them into office.” That is from an affadavit filed by a police department leading the investigation of a shooting at a Tennessee Unitarian church over the weekend that resulted in the deaths of two people and left seven others wounded.

Which reminds me. Oh, yeah, I’m a Democrat, too. Not to mention the head of a media outlet. Not exactly a “major media outlet,” and not exactly a liberal, but still. I’m out there, in more ways than one.

I would expect the kind of abuse in the form of discourse that sometimes comes my way. But I don’t know, I guess I never figured that there were people out there who’d want me dead, and want people like me dead, just because, you know, I think we’ve gotten all wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the Bush administration has sold our economic future to its friends in Big Oil, that Bush and his Republican friends in Congress have kept millions of Americans from the health-insurance rolls because their buddies in the insurance sector make too much money in the current system to do anything to help those who need help.

I mean, that stuff is all important to me, really important. But could my feelings about them ever push me to the point where I could walk into a place of fellowship and shoot people I’ve never known and will never know to prove a political point?

I so much want to blame the talk blowhards – the Limbaughs, the O’Reillys, the Gibsons, the Hannitys – for having wallpapered the nation’s airwaves with their vile musings about how liberals are ruining the country, and say that the blood of Tennessee is on their hands, but I can’t in good conscience. As much as I want to. The shooter in this case had a history of being violent, and really, it could’ve been anything that sent him to that church on Sunday morning.

Maybe, just maybe, the Limbaughs et al will learn one day that not everybody out there tuning in thinks like they do that this war on liberals that they’re waging is figurative, not literal.