Because You Never Asked

     (This essay was written way back when the federal building in Oklahoma City was blown up in the early 90‘s. As I put this essay up on this website in 2007, terrorism has become the 1000 lb. gorilla dominating the nation’s political debate, but the event in Oklahoma City was our first serious brush which this “genre”. I’m pleased to say that what I wrote way back then still seems relevant today, even as it applies to the new terrorism propagated by the Islamic fundamentalists. The essay “Oklahoma City And The Rest Of Us”, is its companion and should be read next.)

     About ten days ago, the federal building in Oklahoma City was blown up. The simple title of this essay is now sufficiently associative to conjure up the well known images from this inexplicable act. Oklahoma is no longer Sooner football, Will Rodgers, nor where the “wind goes whistling down the plain”. It will be a long time before Oklahoma is anything but this demonic act of violence.

     In thinking about this stunning event, I’ve decided not to write about grief, outrage or sorrow. The vocabulary of this writer and whatever facilities he might have in using it, is nowhere sufficient to capture the feelings of those most effected by the tragedy. How could I be so presumptuous in trying to describe the grief of a parent who has just lost a child so senselessly? I’ll simply say how utterly sorry I am, and move on to something I can try to analyze.

     Almost immediately after learning of the explosion and how it was done, I was struck by the incredible capacity for destruction we human beings have developed. By now we all have the twisted, skeletal remains, the ripped out guts of the building, firmly etched in our minds. This devastation was caused by a device which was not even in the structure. In spite of the high tech military wizardry we are now so familiar with --- the “Stealth” jets, the “smart” bombs, the computerized war room precision --- such “amateur” destruction so easily rendered, seems even more frightening. Wow!

     We now have a general idea as to the people or mentality behind the perpetration of the act. They seem to be a loose network of “good ol’ boys” who feel threatened by the government. This loosely translates into a preposterous fear that some guy with a badge is going to come along and confiscate the rifle they go coon hunting with. These are people who believe the United States government, which reigns over 260,000,000 diverse people living together in an extremely complex web of interrelated technologically mind boggling intricacy, should govern in the same way Millard Fillmore did. They feel threatened. How rabidly delirious these people are!

     One must remember these “threatened” people come from a group that has traditionally been the most advantaged in American society, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (Wasps). Not only are they well armed, they are well fed, well clothed, well housed --- the only thing they seem to be lacking is a capacity to think rationally. If I had one wish, that marvelous, Whistler’s Mother kind of house in Michigan, where much of this lunacy seems to have been hatched, might be it. Obviously, this is not a perfect world. Everyone has something to bitch about, but these folks are not thinking clearly. Their reactions to their grievances are not just out of line, they are psychotic.

     Some pundits have tried to equate this right wing violence to the urban, leftist, Panther-like violence of the 60’s. This is unjust on two accounts: 1) no act of Afro-Panther violence ever targeted people so far out of the perceived guilty loop, on such a grand scale, as the Oklahoma bombing, and 2) how can the rage one might feel from the black experience in America, even if it might be what you’d call exaggerated (in truth, the more I learn about the historical DNA of the black man’s journey through this land, the less I feel this is true), be equated with whatever mirage-like grievances these rural vigilantes are claiming? Have they ever been humiliated by “Jim Crow”, or lynched, or had their labor so brazenly exploited like the “wetbacks” along our southwestern borders? Has anyone ever carried out a “pogrum” in their towns and villages? Have they ever been blatantly discriminated against in using public services, or been denied employment or education due to their race, religion or ethnicity? Even the dreaded Arab terrorists, to whom we suspiciously looked first, have more understandable grounds for such irrational degradation; religious conflict, imperial exploitation, the fear of an Occidental destruction of their culture. What about these rednecks, running around in fatigues, in the woods, with their Chuck Norris mentalities? Who is trying to hurt them? These people are operating on the fumes of pure delusion.

     Which brings me to --- (see essay, “Oklahoma And The Rest Of Us”).