God Save America

I spent most of today battling chest pains. But it had nothing to do with high blood pressure, or lack of exercise, or even stress. It's because when I had awakened in the wee hours of last night, as I often do, I made the mistake of checking the headlines on my BlackBerry. That's when I learned about the shooting/mass murder at a political meeting in Tuscon, Arizona.

And that's when the first pangs of heartache began. It took a long while to get back to sleep after reading about what had happened, or what people think happened. And when I finally got out of bed, that's when the guilt kicked in. I realized I've spent so much time over the past year or so focused on African politics that I've been oddly detached about the political scene back home. I know the generalities, like what's going on with the Tea Party, and the growing disappointment with President Obama's performance, but the guilt stems from my blissful disengagement from it all! It's actually been a relief to be able to send a "Tsk, tsk" in a general Westerly direction, and then shift most of my intellectual geopolitical attention to the madness over here.

It's still too early to know whether the Arizona shooting was politically-motivated or not. As several commenters have noted on Al Jazeera and CNN, there are too many mentally ill people with access to guns in America to know for sure if this was an organized political statement or just some guy who stopped taking his meds. And while at first I was going to use the picture of Representative Gabrielle Giffords to illustrate this posting, because I am so relieved she is still alive after being shot in the head, my heart just about gave out on me when I read about the youngest victim, 9-year-old Christina Taylor Greene.

That beautiful child was born on September 11th, 2001. She had just been elected to her school's Student Council. And she went to the meeting after a neighbor, who knew how much she was starting to get interested in politics, extended an innocent invitation.

I don't expect I'll get much sleep tonight, either. And it's funny, just a few days ago, I expected to be completely focused on monitoring the election in Sudan. Now, I'll be kept awake by the sound of my heart's blood dripping for little Christina, and all the while, I'll be praying for my homeland.