Remember back to a day in September, just a year and a half short of a decade ago. Four groups of men hijacked four different airplanes. Three flew headfirst into buildings, the fourth crashed on a rural field in Pennsylvania. Fueled by an extremist branch of a religion, they died in the name of “God.” I use “God” in parentheses, because whether you believe in Him, Her or It or not, only God speaks for God, and men who claim to do so are delusional unto the point of stupidity.
Pretty much everyone in the world was all “Holy shit, WTF.” And everyone agrees that it was an act of terrorism.
Terrorism isn’t easy to define, but let’s agree that for an act to be considered terrorist, it must at least include the threat of violence, possibly as an attempt at exercising political change through the use or threat of continued force.
Right, so: fly planes into buildings and kill a lot of people: terrorist.
However: fly one plane into one building and kill one person, who doesn’t count because he works for the IRS: HERO.
Wait a second, Joe Stack is a hero?
There are some bizarre — and disturbing — comments on this piece fro the Dallas Morning News seem to reflect that opinion.
There’s something extremely wrong in this country when we label as “heroes” people who “protest” things they don’t like by the use of deadly force. There are lots of ways to protest something — make a sign, write a blog, vote for Ralph Nader — and while sometimes, yes, I will concede that violence can be a legitimate form of protest, because taxation is not a violent form of conduct (have you ever seen a 1040EZ form beat the shit out of someone?), using violence in reprisal is sort of like … well, calling yourself a teabagger** completely un-ironically.
I understand why Samantha Bell, Stack’s daughter, wants to view her father as a hero. This is quite possibly a side of her father she never, ever saw. She probably remembers him as the guy who bounced her on her knee, helped her with her homework, put her through college, gave her advice on the men she dated. I don’t know this, obviously, this is all speculation on my part, but it’s supported by this quote:
“The father I knew was a loving, caring, devoted man who cherished every moment with me and my three children, his grandchildren,” she said. “This man who did this was not my father.”
Last week, I got home Wednesday and turned on the TV. I’d watched LOST the night before, so I found myself with an episode of Oprah. Just when I was about to change the channel, the episode’s promo came on: it was about family members of serial killers, and how they dealt with what their family members had done. The son of Jim Jones spoke about how he reconciled his love for his father with the mass murder at Jonestown; and the sister of John Wayne Gacy spoke about her struggles understanding her brother’s actions.
I think it’s probably a similar situation for Samantha Bell. She just needs some good part of her father to hold on to.
As for the larger community of support behind Stack’s actions — well, maybe it’s just because he only killed one low level IRS Bureaucrat, a guy named Vernon Hunter, a Vietnam veteran, and not one of the people who crafted the tax laws Stack railed against — maybe if the collision had killed a whole bunch of children, too, maybe then some of the extreme fringe would have the necessary perspective to step back and say, “No!”
As it is, I don’t think this is the last we’ve seen of domestic, home-grown terrorists. Joe Stack, despite whatever many good qualities he may have had, died in an act of terrorism. Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist. They’re not the first, and they’ll hardly be the last.
*Bob Marshall: Deluded! Stupid!
**The relevant definition is the 2nd.