TUCSON — It should have been a good day for Ally Israel. For everyone in town, really. Or at least everyone downtown. It was a bit cooler than Friday, sure, but the Wildcats had won a close one before the weekend and sixteen-year-old Ally got to sleep in late before a basketball game of her own at Green Fields Country Day.
And then she heard.
"I just started shaking," she told me at the school's gym on Saturday afternoon. "I was so... angry."
Ally had met Gabrielle Giffords a couple times — once at home and once in Washington. Their families became close within a Jewish community that has been tight-knit since Tucson's frontier days. And as that frontier started looking more like a front over the last year, well, the first Jewish woman elected to Congress from Arizona was about as good a role model as a high-school sophomore could find.
Giffords had confounded people by holding court in a district — a state, really — that has developed a decidedly conservative edge. And an increasingly sharp one at that. She beat, in order, a border zealot, a rising star from the state legislature, and, just a couple months ago, a Tea Party stud straight out of Central Casting — as in tall, white, handsome, white, ex-military, and, of course, white. She supported, in order, the passing of President Obama's health-care plan, the repeal of Jan Brewer's controversial SB1070 immigration bill, and the increase of the Border Patrol's presence in town. Her most effective campaign commercial last year featured a craggy-faced Cochise County rancher — a lifelong Republican, probably — who said he would vote for her because "Gabrielle Giffords gets it."
So the most confounding thing about her shooting this weekend — besides conflicting reports as to whether Giffords was actually alive — was not why some nutjob would do such a thing. It was how nutty things have gotten around here so quickly, and why getting angry is getting to be a surprisingly unsurprising experience....
Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/tucson-shooting-news-analysis-4803947?src=rss
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