Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Depending on your politics and personal tastes, Keith Olbermann is a liberal pundit, a newsman, an overhyped sports reporter, a propagandist, the voice of the nation's conscience, or a traitor to his country.  Last evening, he added one title most can agree on -- unemployed.  Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann, announced on his show last night that he was leaving the network.  Rumors vary between him being fired and him leaving over a money dispute.  Last night's show was his last.

Olbermann had a decidedly and unashamedly liberal bent to his show.  He openly loathed Fox News, which he called "faux news," and particularly Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, who often took top honors on his "Worst Person in the World" feature.  Throughout the Bush administration, he ended his newscast by stating how many days it had been since the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.  He was suspended last fall for violating the network's rules about political donations by reporters after he donated to three congressional campaigns, including Gabrielle Giffords. 

Even if you loved Olbermann's politics, there was plenty to squirm about in Olbermann's style.  He often used the same kind of "anyone who disagrees with me is an idiot" kind of rhetoric that he criticized in O'Reilly.  His segments with guest commentators often fit the formula:

• Introduce story by stating the facts intertwined with Olbermann's opinion
• Introduce guest
• Ask guest whether Olbermann's opinion is the only reasonable one, as he thinks
• In unlikely event guest disagrees, restate opinion as fact and wait for response

If you were looking for the news, the whole news, and nothing but the news, you didn't tune in to Countdown.

I'm writing about Keith Olbermann today, however, not because of my personal feelings about him leaving MSNBC or even about the show itself.  Keith Olbermann deserves a nod because of something absolutely unheard of which he did, on air, with great frequency.  Keith Olbermann apologized.

When you are as unabashedly partisan and fiery as Olbermann is, you wind up saying a lot of things that make people mad.  And certainly, Olbermann stood behind the majority of what he had to say nonetheless.  But every once in a while, Keith Olbermann had the good sense and the good grace to admit when he was wrong.  A terrific example occurred after Olbermann raised questions and spoke, in a way that some felt was offensive, about the rape accusations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.  He later tweeted,

Rape has touched my family, directly and savagely, and if anybody thinks I have addressed it without full sensitivity, then that assessment is the one that counts, and I apologize.

Read that again, because you won't hear apologies like that from media people -- or from anyone else, really -- very often.  He doesn't say, "sorry if I offended you," or even, "sorry that I offended you," both of which imply that the problem is the offense taken and not what was said.  He says, "If I offended you then my words were offensive, and so I'm sorry."

Most recently, Olbermann delivered a passionate and, in my opinion, moving commentary the night of the shootings in Tucson on January 9th.  He discussed the current political climate but, unlike many other liberal commentators, he didn't put the blame on the right.  He said,

Vio­lence, or the threat of vio­lence, has no place in our Democ­racy, and I apol­o­gize for and repu­di­ate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inad­ver­tently encour­aged vio­lence. Because for what­ever else each of us may be, we all are Americans.

So, why am I bringing this up on a blog about trauma and crisis response?  Because very often, after a major incident, the impulse of those in charge is to circle the wagons and vehemently deny any responsibility.  The result is that those affected, who are primed to be looking for someone to blame, have a reason to step up their blame of those in charge.  Few and far between are people in authority willing to say, "This shouldn't have happened, we didn't want for it to happen either, and we will be carefully reviewing everything to make sure it doesn't happen again," let alone, "We screwed up, and while we don't think this is entirely our fault, we are willing to take some of the blame.  We're sorry."

It's always easier to blame those who are upset then to take a good long look at yourself.  Failure to do so, however, often makes it worse.  Whatever you think of Keith Olbermann, his show, or his politics, I hope that, with his departure, we don't also lose his excellent example of how to apologize gracefully and sincerely for the mistakes we all make in this world.

Aside from what I had to say last week and today, and will have to say tomorrow, about this horrible event, I wanted to share two tidbits that are important, but neither of which stands on its own as a blog post.


The first is that I'd like to extend my prayers and well-wishes to fellow blogger Ashleigh Burroughs.  I don't know Ashleigh personally, but she and I are both part of the BlogHer network, which sponsors our blogs and links the writing of female bloggers (supposedly quality writing, but then they include me so who knows) across the Internet.  From time to time my sidebar includes links to her blog, "The Burrow," and hers to mine.  When my traffic statistics show people coming here from ashleighburroughs.blogspot.com, I always think, "Thanks, Ashleigh!" even though I know the link was automatically generated.

Ashleigh was at the front of the line to shake Gabrielle Gifford's hand last Saturday when the shooting started.  She was shot three times but, thankfully, survived.  I wanted to publicly recognize Ashleigh and her family, and the difficult road they are on right now.  Life has a funny way of linking people, and I take Ashleigh's shooting more personally than any of the other victims.  It adds a "that could have been me" aspect that is both scary and tender.  I'm keeping Ashleigh and her family in my prayers today and hope that you will, too.

The week since the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, which killed six people and injured an 12 in addition to Giffords, has been full of discussion about our political discourse.  On one side, we have people pointing to the fact that Sarah Palin's website had a map with gunsight graphics over several congressional districts -- including Giffords' -- during the campaign, and to political rhetoric like "2nd amendment solutions" and "lock and load" as being responsible.  On the other, we have people pointing out that the shooter was almost certainly seriously mentally ill.

What both sides have in common is the very human trait of seeking a reason for a traumatic incident.  Studies have shown that humans are hard-wired to see patterns and causation, and if there isn't any we tend to see it anyway.  From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes a lot of sense.  In order to survive in the wild, animals need to have very good and detailed information about what a threat looks like, how to know when it's coming, and how to avoid it.  Understanding that something can't be avoided is not very helpful.  So if there is any chance at all that there is a pattern, we will find it, but we're not great at knowing if there isn't one.

If you ask me (and you did, because you're reading my blog), the choice between blaming this on political rhetoric and blaming this on mental illness is a false dichotomy.  Yes, it seems extremely likely that the shooter is mentally ill.  I don't have enough information to know if he is so ill that he is not criminally responsible for what he did, but it would be ludicrous to suggest that his mental state did not play a part in this tragedy. 

At the same time, mental illness occurs in a context.  The delusions that people experience are influenced by the culture in which they live.  You can see this clearly if you imagine someone with a psychotic mental disorder, in some completely other time and/or place.  I doubt people in the middle ages thought the CIA was monitoring their thoughts through their dental work, and I'm guessing that few such people in Mongolia believe they are Jesus.

This man's delusions apparently centered around illiteracy, mind control, the constitution and the government.  Did he ever see Sarah Palin's graphic or listen to Sharon Angler speak?  I have no idea.  Did he hear the negative tone of current discourse about the government?  Almost certainly.  That is the context of our culture. 

That having been said, that doesn't mean that toning down the rhetoric would have prevented this particular person from killing people.  It might have prevented him from killing these particular people on this day.  And maybe it would have held off the violence for long enough for someone to recognize that he really needed help.  We don't know.  We can't know.  And we don't like that.

What do I take from all this?  As they say, the best we can do is the best we can do.  And whether you blame rhetoric or illness or both for this situation, it's clear we can do better with both.  Talking about armed rebellion and resistance with regards to public figures is not OK, whether it caused this or not.  It adds to a culture that devalues those with whom we disagree, and that can't be good for us, with or without this instance.  And there are hundreds or thousands of severely mentally ill people who don't get decent help and, as in this case, sometimes don't even get noticed, because of the stigma associated with their disorders and the devaluing of its treatment in our society.  That isn't just bad for them.  As we learned this week, it's bad for everyone.  We can do better. 

And if I'm wrong, and neither of these things are at fault, and I'm just seeing patterns where there aren't any, I think our society will benefit from fixing them anyway.  It's certainly worth a try.

Tomorrow:  What pulled at our heartstrings in the Tucson coverage, and why

You don't have to be a fan of Speaker John Boehner to appreciate that he got it exactly right today when he reacted to the attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in which six others, including U.S. District Court Judge John Roll and a child, were killed and Giffords was critically wounded.

An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve.

Eighteen additional people were injured in the shooting, which occurred outside a grocery store in Tucson during a public event hosted by Giffords.  The alleged shooter is a 22-year-old man who, in various social media, talks about himself as the "mind controller" and lists Mein Kampf andThe Communist Manifesto among his favorite books.

I'm not from Arizona and, like many Americans, I knew nothing about Rep. Giffords before today's attack.  Yet the story grabbed my -- and the country's -- attention almost instantly.  If it were just me we could chalk it up to the subject matter of my blog.  After all, my family no longer says, "Did you hear this horrible news?" when something bad happens.  They say, "Do you need a blog topic?"  But it isn't just me.  As I write this than four and a half hours after the shooting, Google News is listing nearly 4,000 news articles online about this event.

To me, this raises two questions of the sort where you think you know the answer until you try to articulate it.  The first is, why do we care about the shooting of someone we've never heard of?  The second is, if we have a reason to care, why do we focus on the fact that Rep. Giffords was shot and not on the death of another public servant, Judge Roll?

The answer to the first question, I think, goes back to Speaker Boehner's remarks.  Understandably, he feels a personal connection when someone targets a member of Congress.  By the same token, we as citizens feel a personal connection because, as the title suggests, congressional representatives represent us. They are our voice in government, whether we love them or hate them.  When someone attacks a member of Congress, we know on a gut level that they are attacking the people that person represents, or at least the people who voted for them.  Whether we ever heard of Gabby Giffords before today or not, the position she holds makes us assign particular and personal significance to her shooting, what it means to us as individuals, and what it means to our system of government.

That having been said, what about Judge Roll?  He was a public servant.  His job was to ensure equal and fair protection of the law for all.  He had received death threats over a recent immigration case, and surely we should worry for our system of government if judges cannot rule without worrying about their lives.  Why aren't we focused on him?

I think there are a couple of reasons.  First of all, eyewitness accounts seem to indicate that Giffords was the first one shot and the original intended target.  In the chaos that followed, she was the only person shot whom everyone knew had been shot.  The news of Judge Roll's death came several hours later, and the story had already been "branded" as being about Giffords.

Still, I suspect that even if Roll had been the target and Giffords had not been there, this would not be as big of a news story.  And I think that's largely because your average person on the street doesn't have a very clear idea of what a District Court judge does.  We understand judges in general, and we understand Supreme Court justices, but we don't have a good mental image of the importance of mid-level federal judges and their day-to-day impact.  We also don't elect federal judges, so we don't feel the connection that we do to members of Congress.  No one out there is thinking, "I know who John Roll is.  He's my judge."

Intellectually, I think that we should care very much about the assassination of Judge Roll, at least as much as the attempted assassination of Rep. Giffords.  But reactions to traumatic events are not about what we think, they're about what we feel in that fleeting moment before our thinking brain takes over. So my gut is focused on Rep. Giffords and her family.  My brain, and the heart that sometimes follows it, also expresses horror and condolences to the family of Judge Roll and the other five people who died in Tucson today.

Abby Guerra, 19, and Marlena Cantu, 21, along with three of their high school friends, were returning to Arizona from Disneyland on July 18 when the SUV they were riding in blew a tire, lost control and rolled over several times.  Reports on that day said that Guerra was killed at the scene and Cantu was in critical condition.  Another friend died at the hospital, and the remaining two were severely injured.  This, by itself, would be an awful situation.

Guerra's autopsy was a relatively low priority, and the county coroner was very busy, so it was scheduled for Friday, July 23.  On Saturday, July 24, her dental records were compared and the startling discovery was made that the body in the Maricopa County morgue was not Abby Guerra.  It was Marlena Cantu.  Abby was in critical condition in the hospital with Marlena's family surrounding her.  Abby's family was planning her funeral, but she wasn't dead.

This sort of thing should not happen, and for the most part it doesn't.  There was a similar case in Indiana in 2006, but such mix-ups are, as they should be, the exception.  This is the cruelest kind of mistake.

When someone we love is suddenly killed or seriously injured, the situation feels surreal.  The most typical reaction to the news is, "This can't be true."  Many people actually say those exact words, sometimes over and over and over.  In this incident, it actually wasn't true.  Guerra's family spent a week trying to grasp the reality of the situation, only to discover that they were, basically, right in the first place -- this wasn't real.  Cantu's family, has the awful reverse -- having spent the week very worried but grateful she was alive, they have found out that she isn't. 

The worst of it, for Marlena Cantu's family, is not just that she is dead.  That by itself would be bad enough, and by itself would cause them to say "this can't be true."  But, on top of that, they have a very real reason to believe that it might not be true.  After all, if Guerra can be thought dead and actually be alive, why can't Cantu?  And while you and I, looking from the outside in, may know that's not going to happen, and while the Cantus may know it on some level as well, one can hardly blame them if they have trouble accepting it.

Aside from disbelief, I would expect the Cantus to also be experiencing some anger.  First of all, for obvious reasons, they are probably mad at emergency personnel, medical personnel and the medical examiner for getting this wrong in the first place.  It would be understandable as well if they were mad at the Guerras on some level.  This is a zero sum game -- one woman is dead and one is alive -- and so, on some level, the fact that Guerra is alive appears to cause Cantu's death.  That isn't a rational statement, but people who have just suddenly lost a loved one are not in a particularly rational place.  If they're like a lot of people, they're mad, they know they shouldn't be mad, and they're mad at themselves for being mad.  That doesn't help much, but it's hard to avoid.

My heart certainly aches for both of these families, for the mix up, for the accident, for the struggle Abby Guerra is now engaged in for her survival, and for the emotional roller coaster they will be on for a long, long time.

Two women in Phoenix, Arizona were out for a walk yesterday evening, when they were attacked by a large swarm of bees.  Authorities estimate they were each stung approximately 1,000 times before firefighters managed to rescue them and a passerby who tried to help them.  All three were hospitalized, and both women are in critical condition.  Neighbors say that some kids were throwing rocks at a bee hive nearby just before the incident.

This is another one of those dangers that you just don't entertain as a possibility.  I don't know about you, but the thought of being covered by stinging bees makes me physically ill -- just the thought of it.  I can't even imagine what it would be like to actually have it happen.  I don't care for bees, I've been stung a time or two, and I try to avoid them.  I teach my children to leave them alone and they'll leave you alone.  And I don't spend a great deal of time considering the possibility of them coming to get me.

This situation fits the definition of a "critical incident" precisely.  It is an event which, because of its suddenness and violence, has the potential to overwhelm one's usual coping skills.  This actually is true in both the emotional and the physical domains.  Witnesses describe the women lying on the ground unable to move from the pain, and one can only imagine the nightmares something like this has the potential to cause.

Nevertheless, these women are actually very poor candidates for Critical Incident Stress Management, at least right now.  CISM follows Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and physical needs come first.  Injured people still sick enough to be in the hospital are by definition not secure in having their physical needs met, and you really can't move on to anything else under those circumstances.  There have been some very critical studies done of CISM that indicate it might be harmful, but these often involve researchers not trained in CISM and traumatized people who are hospitalized -- two big no-nos.

When their physical health is stable, these women may find that the emotional response to this is getting in their way, and if so CISM might well be in order.  They may also find that, while this wasn't a pleasant experience, they are able to rebound from it fairly well on their own.  There really isn't a good way to tell.  One thing is probably certain, however.  They'll never look at a bee quite the same again.