“What Is Government if Words Have No Meaning?”

“What Is Government if Words Have No Meaning?” That’s the question Jared Loughner posed to Gabrielle Giffords in 2007, almost four years before he shot her.

I never interviewed him so I have no idea what he meant, but I know that when a person is developing schizophrenia words DO lose their meaning. In the world as I imagine it could be, if the people around Rep. Giffords had been able to make an educated guess about the meaning that lay beneath his odd and disturbing question, he might have gotten help, lives might have been saved, and government would have demonstrated a greater capacity to respond to people who are suffering.

I believe that society desperately needs a better understanding of mental illness. But I also believe that you don’t have to be mentally ill to feel that your words have no meaning.

Picture saying something that means a lot to you, to a person who sees the world differently. Jesus loves me. Occupy Wall Street. Praise Allah. Homosexuality is a sin. My bonus was too low. Abortion is murder. The creation of Israel was a mistake.  The Iraq war was necessary. The devil tells me to kill myself. Obama 2012.

People usually react to statements like these in global ways – with applause, horror, a shrug, an eye-roll, a drug, or a barrage of arguments, often taking part of an idea out of context so as to have something simple and concrete to fight against. It’s all too rare that we stop and think about why people feel the way that they do, wonder what it’s like to be them, and wonder if there may be kernels of truth (or untruth) hidden beneath ideas that we experience as odd, disturbing, just plain wrong (or just plain right).

What does it feel like to be Mitt Romney? Barack Obama? A mentally ill person? A Wall Street CEO? An Israeli? A Palestinian?  “Stupid crazy blind self-centered incompetent evildoer” is so often the generic way that we imagine people who embrace a worldview that differs from our own. My father could not have accepted homosexuality or abortion without losing his connection with the people in the church around which his life was organized; without tolerating the terror of going to hell, or the equally terrifying possibility that there might not be one.  Those concepts could not have had meaning to him other than “sinful.” I’m sure others would have thought of him as “ignorant.”

Government representatives embody this problem rather than helping us with it. If a person runs for office as a conservative or a liberal, he or she dare not risk consideration of the other side’s perspective for risk of “alienating the base” and being eliminated.  The right eye dares not try to imagine the world as seen through the left, for fear that its lifeline will be severed.

Building bridges of meaning across massive divides is not only difficult, it feels dangerous, and in some ways it is dangerous. We need to make the effort anyway, because not doing so is considerably more dangerous. If our words have no meaning, the alternative is emptiness, alienation, and a leap to action. Sometimes violence is the only way to feel real and alive.