Through prayer and praise, Obama calls for unity, civility

January, locals agree, is the best month in Tucson. The days are incandescent, the nights desert cold and the air always crisp.
No Tucsonan or Arizonan, whether native born or drawn from Minnesota or Moscow, will ever look at January quite the same now.
“Wounded,” is how the editorial cartoonist of the Arizona Daily Star depicted the state of the state, drawing a map riddled with bullet holes. I have come here as an American, who like all Americans, kneels to pray with you today, and will stand by you tomorrow,” Barack Obama told more than 13,000 gathered for a memorial service for the victims of Saturday’s shooting at a political meeting in Tucson.

But while he came to mourn, Mr. Obama also came to implore Tucsonans and Americans to be more civil in their politics.

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it is important to … make sure that we are talking to each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds,” he said.

“What we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. Let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”

Mr. Obama honoured, individually, each of the six civic-minded Tucsonans killed in Saturday’s shooting. They were “fulfilling a central tenet of our democracy envisioned by our founders – representatives of the people answering to their constituents.”

“Our hearts are broken by their sudden passing,” Mr. Obama began. “Our hearts are full of hope and thanks for the 13 Americans who survived the shooting.”

Among them is Gabrielle Giffords, the indomitable 40-year-old Democratic congresswoman who was holding meet-and-greet with constituents when a deranged gunman with a grudge forever altered the course of American political history.

The crowd at the McKale Center arena erupted in a standing ovation as Mr. Obama revealed that Ms. Giffords, whom the President and Michelle Obama visited before the ceremony at a nearby hospital where she is recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, had opened her eyes for the first time since undergoing brain surgery on Saturday. (Some of her colleagues in Congress remained after the Obamas left; they were there when the critically wounded congresswoman opened her eyes.)

The attempted assassination of Ms. Giffords, a moderate Democrat, has sparked a bitter nationwide debate about the increasingly violent tone of political discourse since Mr. Obama’s election.

Indeed, the President came to Tucson only hours after Sarah Palin, as is her wont, had sent the blogosphere and cable news channels aflutter – this time with her Facebook self-exoneration of blame in the massacre of six constituents and the near-fatal injuring of their congresswoman.

“Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own,” Ms. Palin began in a presidentially slick video address, “not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle.”

But while she sought to quash the controversy surrounding her March posting of a map with a bull’s eye on Ms. Giffords’s congressional district, she cranked up another with her use of the term “blood libel” to decry the journalists and pundits who had fingered her.

Few of the thousands who had lined up as early as the night before for a place in the McKale Center – 13,000 more filed into a neighbouring football stadium to watch the service on a JumboTron screen – seemed to be in the mood for debate.

“Just the President’s presence here, that’s showing a lot of respect. I think that will really help us a lot with the healing process,” said Dave Quanrud, 48, a University of Arizona research scientist who waited for eight hours to get inside the arena.

Among those who got a seat inside was Camille Yaden, whose daughter was set to shadow Ms. Giffords on Saturday as part of her efforts to earn her gold Girl Scouts award.

“My brother called from New York and that delayed us,” Ms. Yaden said, adding that she and her daughter arrived at the site of the shooting only minutes after the carnage.

Ms. Yaden then extended her cellphone to play a voice message that Gabe Zimmerman, the 30-year-old Giffords outreach director killed in shooting, had left for her a few weeks ago to set up a meeting.

It is in the memory of Mr. Zimmerman and Christina Taylor Green, the 9-year-old student council member who had come to meet Ms. Giffords, that Mr. Obama appealed to Americans’ better angels.

“I want us to live up to her expectations,” he explained. “I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.”