While watching the 1961 movie version of West Side Story with Natalie Wood Saturday night, my wife and I were struck by the relevance of Maria’s lines as she holds the dying Tony. Tony has just been shot by a rival gang member. Maria looks at the assembled gangs and in a cold hard voice (she had been the essence of sweetness and innocence until now) says, “You all killed him. Not with bullets and knives! With hate! Well I can kill too! Because now I have hate!” She doesn’t though. She learns the film’s lesson: Hate initiates a spiral of responses, including, in the case of Tony’s murder, unpredictable eruptions of violence.
Revisiting the replies from the right following the shooting of Rep. Gabriel Giffords and the killing of six others, we were reminded of the film’s message. Sarah Palin and Tea Party leaders from Arizona were quick to distance themselves, despite the fact that their campaign sites had talked of “targeting” Rep. Giffords. Rank and file tea partiers and Republicans spent the day filling comments pages on web-sites with breathy arguments, dismissing any claim that overheated rhetoric caused Jared Lee Loughner to take aim at Rep. Giffords. But as Maria learned, hate metastasizes and spreads, and we shouldn’t be surprised when it erupts in unpredictable moments, with tragic results.
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