Outside of the office where I work, there is a rare University-sponsored ashtray. Rare, because these days, one is discouraged from smoking in public, and from smoking outside, and from smoking during the daytime, and so on and so forth. But there it sits, a clearly defined and delineated ashtray: a conglomerate stone pillar, three or so feet high, with a small flat-bottomed crater cut into the top, two inches deep and filled with sand, littered with so many cigarette butts, the odd candy wrapper or two, and the sucked-clean head of a lollipop stick. The ashtray is meant to blend in with the rest of the ornaments in the decorative courtyard; benches, tables, and trash bins alike are made with the mixed-stone façade and scattered around great raised beds of grass and mesquite trees.  What makes this ashtray special, what elevates it from the humdrum existence of dirty, disgraceful ashtray-ness and makes it worthy of further reflection is that somebody has written around the inch-wide lip of the crater, in black permanent marker, “This is Not An Ashtray.”

Now, I know this is an ashtray, from having seen its refuse in person, and you know this is an ashtray, just from my description. Haven’t I shown you the sand? The butts? The wrappers? The errant lollipop stick?  These are undeniable markers of a public ashtray, certainly.  And yet…when I look at this sand-filled depression in stone, despite the clear indications to the contrary, my mind is struck by the definitive statement, “This is Not an Ashtray,” and for a moment, I find myself wondering.

Is this really not an ashtray? Have people just co-opted the little stone pillar and begun to use it as an ashtray? Is this not its intended purpose? Am I about to sully this poor rock art installation even further by wantonly ashing into it’s sand cup? After a few moments of reflection, I come to realize that this is probably some healthy person’s contribution to the quit-smoking campaign; a bit annoying perhaps, but a more mellow suggestion than the indignant shouts of an offended pedestrian yelling at me to not smoke around him or her. Still, I saw the words, and in the moment I saw them, I wondered, despite all other evidence to the contrary.

This is how important words are.

Words on the page (or ashtray) can lead us to believe something, or unbelieve something, or wonder if something we know to be true is, in fact, really something false. A picture is perhaps worth a thousand words, and I won’t quibble with that adage, but a sentence or two written on that same picture can itself inform the viewer in a plethora of ways (especially if it was one of my long, rambling, multi-claused and multi-parenthesized sentences that has close to a thousand words, or just seems like it does).

Which is why I feel compelled, to insist over and over in my daily life and in my private writing and now, in this public blog, that language matters. Words matter. From at least the moment we enter formal schooling, and for many of us, much much earlier, we are presented with the Truth and Importance of the written word. We are taught to read as a way of understanding what the world has to offer  and taught to write as a way to convince others of what we believe and need them to hear. We begin to learn these things as toddlers and the idea of written words as a declarative source of truth works its way into our psyche and stays lodged there, in some form or another, for the rest of our lives.  This is not to say that as we get older and increasingly analytical of our surroundings that we don’t start to question what we read, but the idea of words essentially starting in truth as a baseline of meaning is one that will haunt critical thought throughout our lives.

Which is why, in the wake of the shooting in Tucson that killed six people, gravely injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, injured twelve others, and led to a lot of grief, fear, mourning, and reflection in the desert, I think it’s appropriate to talk about how words may well have somehow influenced the shooter.  While I don’t think that Jared Lee Loughner necessarily read or viewed Sarah Palin’s Gun Sights memo prior to his rampage, I do think that rhetoric like that helps to inform the national consciousness and influences our views of normative behaviors.

I know that many people say this is irrelevant; it was a lone, crazed gunman, not an organization or a violent tractate that led to this event. But I charge that language matters. Sane people, crazy people, large groups, small groups, everybody with ears and eyes hears and reads the things that public people say, and we all internalize these things. Hate speech is damaging beyond its initial press-worthy salvo; it worms its way into our minds and our hearts and sows seeds of fear and violence.

Furthermore, I’m convinced that talking and thinking about the role of political rhetoric in the context of this shooting is not partisan, or unfair, or victimizing anybody.  At the same time, I don’t think that we should arrest people who say things like this or fine them or penalize them in any way. I believe in freedom of speech and I stand by everyone’s right to say what they think and feel. But freedom of speech isn’t freedom from criticism, harsh though it may be and guilt-provoking as it may seem.  Those of us who think that right-wing rhetoric is damaging to the national consciousness have just as much right to say these things as the right-wingers have to talk about “locking and loading” on the “political battlefield.” I’ll even go one step further and say that as citizens of America and participants in world culture, it’s our responsibility to talk about these things, and criticize what we find faulty.

Because words? They matter. Whether we trust them, or mistrust them, or understand them or don’t, they influence our emotions and perceptions enough to make us wonder if something is really what it seems to be, despite all visual evidence pointing in one direction.  Words are powerful. Language matters.  Say what you want to say, and what you need to say, and what you think others should hear. But while you’re doing it, watch your mouth.

Yesterday, I posed the following question: why is it that even after almost twenty years of observing the holiday, do so many people believe that Arizona still refuses to celebrate MLK, Jr. Day? One would think that after being holdouts for so long and in such public fashion, the fact of Arizona’s decision to finally observe the holiday in 1992 would have generated so much press that that would be what people remember: the final act of capitulation in the face of (horrors!) losing the chance to host the Super Bowl. But that’s not how it worked. People still hold on to the idea that Arizona is a bizarre institution that refuses to honor our most influential Civil Rights leader. And I have some ideas as to why this might be so.

1. Most people don’t know anything about Arizona.

As with everything else on this green earth (green, industrial-grey-steel colored, whatever), there are many factors that contribute to this problem – there is no single, solitary answer.  But let’s start with the fact that most people don’t know the first thing about Arizona. Sure, the mention of our state might spark the mental image of a saguaro, or rows of brightly colored adobe homes. But it’s just as likely that the average listener, upon hearing “hey, about Arizona…” will picture rolling sand dunes (we haven’t got any) and miles of flat, dusty, uninhabited earth (I wish we had more of that, but we’re a metropolis with over one million people. There’s a bit of city living to be done here). When you don’t know the first thing about a place, it’s pretty easy to hear a rumor or two and automatically assume that they’re cold hard facts. There’s nothing in that arsenal between your ears that’s going to suggest anything different. So, somebody makes a comment about Arizona not celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and people within hearing distance just assume it to be true, and then they tell other people, who also know nothing about Arizona, and those people assume it to be true…BLAMMO! The rumor mill has begun!

2. Y’all think we’re the Wild West out here.

People who DO know something about Arizona usually know this: “Hey! Isn’t that where they made all those Westerns my Grandpa watches muted on the TV while the rest of us groan and try to steal the remote?” Or, better yet: “Isn’t that where gun-toting, states-rights advocate, and general government hater (if faithful participant) John McCain is from?” Now, while both of those things are true, they are not everything that defines our state.  This is not some sort of anything-goes-frontier-town-almost-like-HBO’s-Deadwood kind of place. We’ve got laws and office buildings and schools and marching bands and theaters and a downtown and a ballet company and an opera, too. In short: we’re just like you. But if your concept of Arizona is borne of some Cowboys-and-Indians fantasy, it’s pretty easy to believe that we’re a bunch of white guys in wide-brimmed hats that spend all our time hatin’ on the Reverend Doctor.

3. People desperately want to believe that we don’t celebrate MLK Day.

You heard me right. People want to believe. It’s all X-Files up in their brains. People – specifically, Americans – want to believe that there’s a place, a defined, tangible, touch it on the map place where the collective racism of an entire country is held. It’s like the uncle who you don’t like to introduce your friends to, because of his insistence on using the most inappropriate racial slurs in casual conversation. In this paradigm, Arizona is the dark family shame that, in it’s vocal expression and our heartfelt disdain, makes the rest of us feel better about just how accepting and un-biased we are.  Rather than look at the racism, sexism, gender-bias or anti-immigrant sentiment that we experience every day in our oh-so-liberal East and West Coast cities or our America’s heartland small towns, we can look at the over-publicized, over-hyped racism of a little known and even more poorly understood state and project our hatred of these thoughts in one easy-to-spot rectangle in the desert southwest.  It’s a place to point and say: “yes, we have racism in America, sure we do, but it’s over there, not over here. Over here, we’re all open minded and lovey-dovey and we just don’t see a bit of difference between people, no sir, we surely don’t.”  Having a scapegoat like Arizona lets the rest of America acknowledge the inherent racism in our country without having to admit that a lot of it is far closer to home than one might like.  If there’s a place so backwards that it doesn’t celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s accomplishments, then that must mean that all the rest of the places, those in which WE live, are doing pretty well by comparison.

Of course, the truth lies somewhere in the vast grey middle.

There are certainly racist people in Arizona, and some of them are elected to public office, while others are just as loud as the dickens, and yes, still others who carry guns and think that even two year olds should be armed with concealed weapons when they go to have a pint at the local bar.  However, there are also plenty of good-hearted folk who believe in judging people on the content of the character and not the color of their skin.  It’s those folks who, in 1992, just six years after it became a national holiday, voted to make Martin Luther King, Jr., Day a celebration that the state recognized.  It’s those folks who are part of the majority of Arizonans who think that SB1070 is a racist law that should be struck down. It’s those folks: white, black, Mexican, Native, Christian, Jewish, Hindi, short, tall, fat and skinny who really make up our population and contribute to our identity as the Grand Canyon State, home to the saguaro, the javelina, the largest swath of the Sonoran desert in the United States, and homeland of great Nations who against all odds preserve their culture throughout the lush desert land. And it’s those people, and that Arizona, that I hope we’ll all make an effort to remember when we hear those indefatigable rumors again on the third Monday of next year’s January.

It’s warm here in Tucson, Arizona – we’re supposed to have a high of 78 degrees today – and for some people, that would be reason enough to go on living in the desert southwest. After all, it’s January 17th and we’re enjoying what passes for summertime weather in most of the northern states. But since I moved here a year ago (tomorrow it will, in fact, be exactly one year since I finished hauling the rest of my junk across the country, this time via plane, and settled into my Tucson existence), many many many people who know me, love me, and wish I was “Back East” have questioned my decision to make Tucson my home.  Hey, fair enough: over the course of the year, circumstances beyond my control have given folks a lot of reason to wonder what the hell I’m doing out here.

Let’s see…there was the passage of SB1070, that lovely little law that takes the immigration debate ten steps too far; Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s proud declaration that he “already [has] a concentration camp. It’s called ‘Tent City,’” as he described his probably illegal, definitely immoral housing of county inmates; a plethora of Tea Party rallies (one, notably, attended by Sarah Palin and John McCain), marked by horrifyingly racist posters and obscenely dangerous rhetoric (“lock and load!”); the election of Jan Brewer as Governor, despite her support of 1070, her stance on immigration issues in general, and her seemingly non-stop lies about…well, about everything; last week’s shooting that killed six people and injured 13 others while gravely wounding Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; and today’s refusal on the part of the state to celebrate Martin Luther King Day.

WAIT!  Arizona does, in fact, celebrate MLK Day, and was not even the last state in the Union to recognize its existence (that would be New Hampshire, which until 1999 celebrated “Civil Rights Day” instead; South Carolina was the last state to offer the day as a paid holiday to all state employees). Granted, our celebration of the holiday wasn’t codified until 1992, after a second public referendum on the topic (the first one went down in flames), several gubernatorial orders against the holiday’s statutory inception, and an NFL Superbowl boycott of the Sun Devils stadium, but we DO celebrate MLK day, and have for nearly a decade.

But this morning, Rev. Al Sharpton and MSNBC host Donnie Deutsch publicly wondered if Arizona should secede from the union since they don’t celebrate the holiday. And I can’t tell you how many times people have mentioned this to me over the past year, wondering how I could move to a state that doesn’t recognize the contributions of our country’s most influential Civil Rights leader.

So why the discrepancy between fiction and reality when it comes to Arizona’s celebration of MLK Day? More to the point, why is the discrepancy so pervasive and widespread that very educated newspeople, friends, and family members of mine all had or have it firmly embedded in their brains that this state insists on ignoring a holiday that, in reality, we’ve been celebrating for a decade?

Why, indeed? More on that tomorrow.

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Well, now I do, too.