Maybe I should just make another Twitter and/or FriendFeed account to serve as an outlet for the random thoughts that come unbidden to my mind that are too tangential and decontextualized for anyone else to make sense of. I’m not really ready to coherently blog about everything that has happened. I was really only going to post three words that popped into my head as I listened to NPR and hearing about how the staff of Gabrielle Gifford’s office is doing, three words that imperfectly describe what I’ve been feeling this entire week:

Anger born of grief

I listened to Gifford’s staffers describing how much they miss Gabe Zimmerman. I thought again of Christina Green. And of all the victims of this atrocity. And then I thought about Gifford’s likely arduous path to recovery, slowly and painfully regaining function, and all the probable obstacles and setbacks that I’ve seen other patients of with traumatic brain injury and patients with stroke endure.

And I end up thinking about all the absurd defensive mutterings on the web fraught with disgusting hyperbole that I’ve read, all essentially in the same vein as Palin’s egregious use of “blood libel”, with no seeming awareness about actual equivalency, all laden with strident sanctimony about how we shouldn’t have to change a thing about the vitriol and invective spewed in our public discourse.

But maybe I let these external tragedies get to me too much.

I keep trying to remember the end of Candide: “All that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden.”

I try to be hopeful. As they say, this too shall pass, soon overshadowed by whatever new national tragedy might overtake us. I guess that’s not really that hopeful. But the trajectory we’re headed down just seems like the expressway to self-destruction. It makes it easy to wallow in pessimism. Hope is difficult to summon.

But then I remember that you don’t really need hope to keep going. Sometimes you just have to keep going anyway.