BY GARY JOHNSON

rerprinted from Loose Change, Twin Cities Business

What a shame that it takes the attempted assassination of a public servant and the murder of six people, including a federal judge and a lovely little girl aspiring to be a politician, to divert our attentions from the polarizing political climate we’ve created.

My Facebook page receives three or four hundred posts a day, and over the past year it has been populated mostly by political grinding of one sort or another. Because my Facebook friends lean mostly to the left, you can well imagine what the general rant du jours are. The “righties,” however, are no less virulent—and often move the dial well past reason. Both sides—and isn’t that really the problem: “sides”?—are terribly polarized, a condition brought on by the flashpoint issues of the past few elections.

What we’ve chosen to ignore, or accept, is that in a country as diverse as America, we are an aggregation of sides, angles, and perspectives, more than at any time in our history. Somehow we have failed to realize that our political system simply will not work without discourse, reasoned and anchored in compromise. I’ll be so bold as to suggest that a shared mission, as much as we can identify it together, should drive whatever that discourse is and whatever we decide to do to address it.

The murders in Arizona were the result of a sickened mind, one that needed a great deal of help and likely a huge pile of anti-psychotic drugs. As a side note, this sad man had indicated plenty of times that he was in need of desperate help. He should have been institutionalized or under psychiatric care. If anything, we need more effective vigilance, which is particularly easy for those troubled human beings who choose to use technology as a means of expressing their innermost demons.

Too, we need to create more effective background checks for gun owners. I am not espousing taking guns away, only keeping them out of the hands of people who will use them for ill. Finally, we have to understand that extreme positions among the rational beings in our society only serve to fuel the irrational notions of people just on the other side of the sanity fence.

That said, we simply have to moderate our discourse, my friends. Sarah Palin was adamant that her “crosshairs” message during the election had nothing to do with guns. She missed the point, yet again. The use of that metaphor, one that likely resonated to a lot of Tea Party advocates (even in its literal translation), stirs the pot of flammable and hyperbolic thinking that incites anger. Unfortunately in Arizona, that type of rhetoric may have stirred up more than just thinking. It may have given an already crazy psyche one more reason to pull the trigger.

Editor’s Note:  Gary Johnson is President of MSP Communications in Minneapolis, MN.  He writes regularly for the Twin Cities Business and is a resident of Eden Prairie, MN