As with the Fort Hood shooting, unspeakable evil came face-to-face with remarkable courage as seemingly ordinary citizens demonstrated that they were, in fact, extraordinary. It was as if Hannah Arendt's penetrating analysis of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, the Banality of Evil had been turned completely around. This was the banality of heroism, the previously untapped, perhaps even unimagined, capacity to defy personal danger to help someone in life-and-death need.

The heroism was overshadowed by the tragedy that unexpected and extreme courage did not, could not, prevent. A politician is gravely wounded, a Judge is murdered, and then there is the nightmarish thought of a life ended at the age of nine. What possible political significance could have been carried by the precocious little Christina Taylor Green, beyond her election to her student council?

Battle lines are drawn, as they were after the Fort Hood incident. This time there is no Muslim community to target with collective guilt. Instead we have cross hairs and second amendment remedies, the imagery and rhetoric of violence. The assaults, the death threats, and the vandalism of the last election were accompanied by the startling presence at public events, even events involving the President of the United States, of angry individuals ostentatiously brandishing firearms.

I believe Sarah Palin's heartfelt horror at the shooting. I am sure to a moral certainty that, when she put Gabby Giffords in that now-famous cross hairs image, the motivation was far from violent, that ratification of gun-culture symbolism carried no anticipation of deadly confrontation. After protests over the gunsight, her subsequent defiant message of "lock and reload" was obviously intended as nothing more sinister than to irritate and inflame the liberal enemy. You think the cross hairs were out of bounds? Try this!

I have no doubt that the young man with mixed up ideology acted on his own. He was not a captive of Sarah Palin or anyone else. He bears complete responsibility for his own actions. If there was any remote connection between those actions and some Palinesque influence, it was only a young deranged individual latching onto some far out idea that could have come from any direction. The direct responsibility of any link is too small to consider.

Conservatives do not need to prove a counter connection. One rightward individual urges fellow conservatives to claim the murderer was a liberal because he once possessed a book containing writings of Karl Marx.

Sarah Palin's cross hairs do not need to be explained away. "We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights," insists one Palin aide, improbably. "It was simply cross-hairs like you'd see on maps." A surveyor's mapping mark mistaken by casual readers for something dangerous.

Gradations of symbols do not have to be elevated beyond their obvious meaning. That some liberal group "targeted" an opponent for defeat does not have to be made the equivalent of a gunsight. "She is dead to me" cannot be mistaken, even by the deranged, for "I want her dead."

The defense is not needed, because the liberal temptation to find a connection is not needed. The idea that Sharron Angle's rhetoric about guns as a fallback alternative to ballots reached across the internet to captivate the mind of this soon-to-be child killer is farther than far fetched.

The lesson is much simpler. It is clear as crystal.

No matter the glee at irritating the other side, no matter the angry passion, no matter the lack of connection between inflamed rhetoric and violent death, look inward and think. You do not have to be complicit in the death of the next small innocent to be guilty of a lesser, still terrible, offense:

Today's thoughtless cheerleading for tomorrow's unimagined violence.