Barack Obama Tuscon Speech a Call For Public Healing, Civil Discourse

 Barack Obama Tuscon Speech a Call For Public Healing, Civil Discourse

President Barack Obama did his best to comfort Tucson, Arizona and the nation as a whole last night at a eulogy for the victims of last week's tragedy.

Urging Americans to forward on "in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds," his speech evoked memories of the six killed and many wounded.

Among those wounded was U.S. Rep. Gabrille Giffords, whose supermarket meet-and-greet instead became the site of this unspeakable tragedy.

Obama Tuscon Speech

Obama condemned our nation's increasingly harsh public dialogue, or "politics, point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle."

"Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully," he told 14,000 people at the University of Arizona's McKale Memorial Center in Tucson.

Instead, he called upon us "to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

THG