We think too simply about cause and effect.  We Americans are submerged in the tragic illusion that we are separate individuals who make ourselves.  No one is self-made.  And the politician Hubert Humphrey was right to say that there is nothing worse than for a person to think that she has made herself. Because nothing could be further from the truth.

So many times in the past week or so it has been said that the lethal actions of Jared L. Loughner are ‘not connected’ to Tea Party declarations about ‘second amendment’ solutions should their candidates not win at the ballot box.  We have heard that it is outrageous to insinuate that Sarah Palin’s map showing crosshairs which included Gifford’s district are ‘not connected’ to the shooting.  We have even heard that no one can ever know whether these things and others (like the general atmosphere of rancor and vilification in American political rhetoric) are ‘connected’ with the shooting.

I have news for all of us.  There is no such thing as a disconnected thing.

Please stop for a moment and list all of the causes and conditions that make you possible; list all of the relationships, from the subatomic dance in your fingertips when they touch the hand of your beloved to the relationship you have with the bit of lettuce from yesterday’s lunch, list all of the relationships that compose you, in other words all the things which are connected to make you you.  Please list all of them.  I’ll wait.

The truth is we are only composed of relationships, and the number of relationships is really infinite.  Remove or change even one in any way and we are changed into a different creature: I will no longer be the same (unless you have a very peculiar definition for the word ‘same’).  But, our overly simplistic and overly linear analysis of cause and effect, of relationships, illuminates only the smallest sliver of a fraction of the interconnections that compose all that is in our entire cosmos.

Mr. Loughner is no lone gunman, because there is no such thing as acting alone.  But even to say this sounds like insanity because we are forced to believe the deadly ideology of radical individualism. And it is the character of ideology that we are forced to believe that for anyone to think differently certainly means insanity.

The truth is that the deadly ideology of radical individualism is radically contrary to the reality of the cosmos, and to be subjected to its ideological hold has the effect of multiplying mental illness and dementia (dementedness).

Our submergence in the ideology of separateness and radical individualism has the effect of absolving us of our responsibility for the shootings.  But this is only a fraud.  We are all an integral part of a society that failed to respond with love and care and concern and attention to the needs of a real human person until he was turned into something not quite human, something capable of the atrocities he committed. It is your fault.  It is my fault. It is OUR fault.

Even if you have never met Jared Loughner, your life is connected with the life of the shooter.  And even though I have never met Jared Loughner, so is mine. My biases are part of the shooter.  And so are yours.

Even if you never met the victims, when the victims died, your relationships were altered forever.  And so were mine.

We are the shooter, and we are the victims. They are us and we are them.

As long as we continue to atomize one another, and do the violence of perpetuating the lies about our separateness, we will continue to foster the tragedy and dementia that impoverish us, and we will continue to create shooters and victims.  To continue on the same path is homicide. To continue on the same path is suicide.  So isn’t it about time that we try another path?

The other path is the way of love. The only way there can be an I, a me, or a mine is when there is an us, a we, and an ours.  It will only be when I can desire only the best outcome for the supposed ‘other,’ in precisely the same way I desire the best outcome for ‘me’ that Jesus’ command to love will be enacted.  In other words, the way of loving the other as the self means above all else recognizing that the other is the self.

That means that it is always a lie to hide behind the self-absolving rhetoric of “it is not connected.”  Though it will be more difficult in the short run, we must undertake the path of uncovering the connections rather than denying them, since the latter route leads to tragic repetition of the violences that plague us.

Let us honor our interconnectedness, seek to understand it, and…

Let’s become a new creation together.