One of the best things about the memorial service, at the University of Arizona, for the victims of the Tucson shooting, was an aspect that also threw some people: the cheering. There was a lot of it. But it was hard, most of the time, to tell just who the shouting was for: Daniel Hernandez, the intern who helped keep Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords alive, got the greatest applause when he deflected the praise to other people. During Obama's speech, it may have been when he said that today, for the first time since a bullet passed through her brain, "Gabby opened her eyes." The eyes of the crowd were not all on him, or even on the astronaut in the front row, Mark Kelly, Giffords's husband, or Michelle Obama and Janet Napolitano, next to him; time and again, people were looking at each other, as when "petite Patricia Maisch," as Obama called her, stood and was surrounded by taller, hugging people. (Maisch is the sixty-one-year-old who pulled the spare magazine out of Jared Loughner's pocket before he could reload his gun.) They weren't happy, exactly, but they were loving, and glad of that. The evening made it clear, first, that those who died had not lived in isolation, and that the rescue of those who didn't die was a group effort. That is worth applauding.

 

Obama spoke about all the victims, but especially about Christina Taylor Green, the child who was killed. At times it seemed hard for him to do so calmly. (Christina was just three months younger than Sasha Obama.) In Obama's speech, Christina became a sort of better angel:

 

Imagine for a moment: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

 

I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it.

 

It is that good. In the prepared remarks, the line was "I want us to live up to her expectations" – the omission of "us" made for a rare moment when talking only about oneself struck a note of humility. Afterward, a commentator on CNN said that Obama, in his appeal for civility, wanted us all to think of Christina's "innocence." She was innocent, of course, in the sense of being free from blame or badness, but Obama also marked, and was awed by, the way she was becoming what might, in the best sense of the word, be called worldly: "starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future." She had opened her eyes. Keeping them undimmed by "cynicism or vitriol" is not the same as never gazing critically at the world, engaging with it politically, or thinking ambitiously about how one might change it. (This was a girl who wanted to be the first woman in Major League Baseball.) Those are all things one wishes Christina could do.

 

We do need civility, and one hopes we get more of that, and less scorn. We also need politics. And true civility can be disruptive – it is not civil, for example, to abandon the unpopular or unfairly treated. There are times when smiling blandly is far more cynical than raising one's voice would be – when politeness is uncivil – just as there are times when cheering at a memorial is a profound act of mourning.

 

There was more to the evening, of course – the Native American blessing, the Sandra Day O'Connor sighting, the stories of all the victims (Phyllis Schneck would "sew aprons with the logos of the Jets and the Giants to give out at the church where she volunteered"), a W.S. Merwin poem, a choir singing "Simple Gifts." Amid all that, Obama's speech was one of his best in a long time; it wasn't so much a rallying cry as a call to sustain an embrace.

 

[Amy Davidson is a senior editor at The New Yorker.]

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